Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield
furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace.
Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating
steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair,
because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care.
What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?"
Which expressed an instinct common to the race, and one which would in
the end bring to nothing the most strenuous efforts of social and
ethical reformers.
3
They got married. Chester took, for the occasion, the name of Gilbert
Lewis; it was surprising how easy this was. The witness looked
attentively at him, but probably always looked like that at the people
getting married. Neither he nor the registrar looked intelligent, or as
if they were connecting Chester's face with anything they had seen
before.
After the performance they went to Italy for a fortnight. Italy in
August is fairly safe from English visitors. They stayed at Cogoleto, a
tiny fishing town fifteen miles up the coast from Genoa, shut in a
little bay between the olive hills and the sea. To this sheltered coast
through the summer months people come from the hot towns inland and fill
every lodging and inn and pitch tents on the shore, and pass serene,
lazy, amphibious days in and out of a sea which has the inestimable
advantage over English seas that it is always at hand.
The Chesters too passed amphibious days. They would rise early, while
the sea lay cool and smooth and pale and pearly in the morning light,
and before the sand burnt their feet as they walked on it, and slip in
off the gently shelving shore, and swim and swim and swim. They were
both good swimmers. Chester was the stronger and faster, but Kitty could
do more tricks. She could turn somersaults like an eel, and sit at the
bottom of the sea playing with pebbles, with open eyes gazing up through
clear green depths. When they bathed from a boat, she turned head over
heels backwards from the bows, and shot under the boat and came up
neatly behind the stern. Chester too could perform fairly well; their
energy and skill excited the amazed admiration of the _bagnanti_, who
seldom did more than splash on the sea's edge or bob up and down with
swimming belts a few yards out. Chester and Kitty would swim out for a
mile, then lie on their backs and float, gazing up into the sea-blue
sky, before the sun had climbed high enough to burn and blind. Then they
would swim back and return to the inn and put on a very few clothes and
have their morning coffee, and then walk up the coast, taking lunch, to
some little lonely cove in the shadow of rocks, where they would spend
the heat of the day in and out of the sea. When they came out of the
water they lay on the burning sands and dried themselves, and talked or
read. When the heat of the day had passed a little, and the sea lay very
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account