Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET 131
International Banks of Settlements. In German
chemical works—who knew ?—there were pallid
young folk accruing dividends on that money of
hers; on tramps at sea, with guano from the
Peruvian islands; in Italy, with its comic State
ferocities and its hunger-line industrial workers.
... I saw these things, in picture after picture, and
Pelagueya lowered her head again, listening. And
suddenly she said something of which indeed I had
not thought.
“So in every country—except our own !—this
stuff that gives me pretty clothes and the memory of
Oliver and Colonel Anton Saloney for my escort on
pleasure-jaunts—it is the surplus of folk who live
on a hunger-line only a little above that of the
Warrens ?”
“That is so,” I said, and Pelagueya, with almost
the same gesture as the drunken boy in the Wagh el
Berka, put her hands to her head.
“Then there’s nothing I can do. Is there ? And
after all—even the making of my pretty dresses and
the taking of me on pleasure-j aunts : they provide
work, do they not ? I spend only the smallest fraction
of the Gault income. It is reinvested to make work
for more people. So ”
She looked at me, bright-eyed with hope, with
that horrific memory of the cheated of the sunlight
fading behind the easy, protective veils the mind can
self-drape at such moments. I said :
“There is nothing you can do, but even that does
not absolve you. Nor any of us. We have made of