Architects -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction
"Old Agg! Not she!" he protested, pleased, but a little embarrassed.
"Will she be up?"
"You'll see whether she'll be up or not. Nine o'clock's the time, isn't
it?"
They reached the gardens of Cheyne Walk. Three bridges hung their double
chaplets of lights over the dark river. On the southern shore the shapes
of high trees waved mysteriously above the withdrawn woodland glades
that in daytime were Battersea Park. Here and there a tiny red gleam
gave warning that a pier jutted out into the stream; but nothing moved
on the water. The wind that swept clean the pavements had unclouded ten
million stars. It was a wind unlike any other wind that ever blew, at
once caressing and roughly challenging. The two, putting it behind them,
faced eastward, and began to pass one by one the innumerable ornate
gas-lamps of Chelsea Embankment, which stretched absolutely rectilinear
in front of them for a clear mile. No soul but themselves was afoot. But
on the left rose gigantic and splendid houses, palaces designed by
modern architects, vying with almost any houses in London, some dark,
others richly illuminated and full of souls luxurious, successful, and
dominant. As the girl talked creatively about the breakfast, her arm
pressed his, and his fingers clasped her acquiescent fingers, and her
chaste and confiding passion ran through him in powerful voltaic
currents from some inexhaustible source of energy in her secret heart. It
seemed to him that since their ride home in the hansom from the
Promenade concert her faculty for love had miraculously developed. He
divined great deeps in her, and deeps beyond those deeps. The tenderness
which he felt for her was inexpressible. He said not a word, keeping to
himself the terrific resolves to which she, and the wind, and the
spectacular majesty of London inspired him. He and she would live
regally in one of those very houses, and people should kowtow to her
because she was the dazzling wife of the renowned young architect,
George Cannon. And he would show her to Mrs. John Orgreave and to Lois,
and those women should acknowledge in her a woman incomparably their
superior. They should not be able to hide their impressed astonishment
when they saw her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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