Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
"No," said Chester. "We shan't know that. There may be a jolly old row;
I daresay there will; but it won't be because people have got too
clever; it will be because they haven't got clever enough. It'll be the
short-sighted stupidity of people revolting against their ultimate
good."
"As it might be you and me."
"Precisely. As it might be you and me.... What we're doing is horribly
typical, Kitty. Don't let's ever blind ourselves to its nature. We'll do
it, because we think it's worth it; but we'll do it with our eyes open.
Thank heaven we're both clear-headed and hard-headed enough to know what
we're doing and not to muddle ourselves with cant about it.... That's
one of the things that I suppose, I love you for, my dear--your
clear-headedness. You never muddle or cant or sentimentalise. You're
hard-headed and clear-eyed."
"In fact, cynical," said Kitty.
"Yes. Rather cynical. Unnecessarily cynical, I think. You could do with
some more faith."
"Perhaps I shall catch some from you. You've got lots, haven't you? As
the husband is the wife is; I am mated to, etc.... And you're a lot
cleverer than I am, so you're most likely right.... We're awfully
different, Nicky, my love, aren't we?"
"No doubt we are. Who isn't?"
For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while
the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green
stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated
on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the
mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long
accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the
world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one
small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight.
So they looked at one another, speculating, until speculation faded into
seeing, and instead of personalities they became to one another persons,
and Chester saw Kitty red-lipped and golden-eyed and black-lashed and
tanned a smooth nut-brown by sun and sea, and Kitty saw Chester long and
lean and sallow, with black brows bent over deep, keen, dreaming eyes,
and lips carrying their queer suggestion of tragedy and comedy.
"Isn't it fun," said Kitty, "that you are you and I am I? I think it
must be (don't you?) the greatest fun that ever was since the world
began. That's what I think ... and everywhere millions of people are
thinking exactly the same. We're part of the common herd, Nicky--the
very, very commonest herd of all herds. I think I like it rather--being
so common, I mean. It's amusing. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said, and smiled at her. "I think I do."
Still they lay there, side by side, in the extraordinary hushed
sweetness of the evening. Kitty's cheek was pressed against short warm
grass. Close to her ear a cicale chirped, monotonously bright; far off,
from every hill, the frogs began their evening singing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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