Lost trumpet

214
THE LOST TRUMPET
We stood and listened in the silver fall of moon¬
light. Nothing to hear. The rose-scent rippled
over us in little wavelets. Pelagueya was very near.
That rose-petal
Nights and days of weariness ; year on long drag¬
ging year, with ways and faces and bodies over¬
familiar, and the chirp of the grasshopper deafening
in the ears of both of us. I knew the tale, I knew the
tale! This was a moment’s madness, dead and
dreadful and a weary thing already in the womb of
to-morrow. Moonlight and a rose-leaf’s wander¬
ings—
I put Pelagueya away from me then. She laughed,
sobbingly. And then, as we stared at each other
mutely the banal clangour of the dinner-bell came
echoing down the garden.
Subchapter v
We went back to the camp across a stillness of
white, moonlighted lands. Huebsch and Marrot
walked in advance. Quaritch beside me, I remember,
had a face streaked and bedaubed with moonlight
shadow like a pen and ink sketch. It was that kind
of moonlight, caricaturing the earth and all things
that on it moved. Quaritch’s voice, snapping the
silence, startled me out of a dreary pondering. Which
the reality—the moonlighted world or the sun-
lighted ?
“That girl back there, sir—Aslaug Simonssen.
Why hasn’t somebody seduced her before this ?”