Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET 133
gathering together the little impedimenta of her
handbag.
“We’ve forgotten the communists, Anton—no
more of that talk now, nor the pleasant socialist
pleasantly preparing to bring about Utopia. Instead
—a Georgian peasant in the Kremlin, trampling
underfoot everything clean and sweet, the clown in
the palace of the Tsars ”
“I cannot imagine that the palace will know much
difference,” I said. “And at least it is not dynastic,
the clownishness that rules now.”
“Anton—you’re a communist.”
Pelagueya was angry at last. And I could not
but smile at that emigre anger. I said : “I have ceased
holding to any ‘ism’, Princess.”
She stood up, still angry. “You have almost
ceased to hold to life !”
I stood up also, Esdras Quaritch’s book falling
open in my hand at a great freakish blob of illustra¬
tion. It caught Pelagueya’s attention also. She
craned over my shoulder, angry but curious, to see
it.
I think I have forgotten to say that the book was
not only written by the drunken boy of the Wagh
el Berka, but illustrated as well. And a certain eager
vividness and power of the macabre he certainly
did possess. Across the page sprawled a blind and
horrifying and proliferating object, something in
shape between a three months’ human embryo and
such monster as might have crept from a jar of
Paracelsus. Multilimbed, mindless, blind, this Thing