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 smooth and still in the late afternoon, with no waves at all, only a gentle, whispering swaying to and fro, they would go further afield; climbing up the steep stone-paved mule-tracks that wound up the hills behind, passing between grey olive groves and lemon and orange gardens and vineyards of ripening vines and little rough white farmhouses, till they reached the barer, wilder hill slopes of pines and rocks, where the hot sweetness of myrtle and juniper stirred with each tiny moving of sea air.
They would climb often to the top of one or other of this row of hills that guarded the bay, and from its top, resting by some old pulley well or little shrine, they would look down over hills and sea bathed in evening light, and see to the east the white gleam of Genoa shimmering like a pearl, like a ghost, between transparent sea and sky, to the west the point of Savona jutting dark against a flood of fire.
There was one hill they often climbed, a steep little pine-grown mountain crested by a little old chapel, with a well by its side. The chapel was dedicated to the Madonna della Mare, and was hung about inside with votive offerings of little ships, presented to the Madonna by grateful sailors whom she had delivered from the perils of the sea. Outside the chapel a shrine stood, painted pink, and from it the mother and child smiled kindly down on the withered flowers that nearly always lay on the ledge before them.
By the shrine and the well Chester and Kitty would sit, while the low light died slowly from the hills, till its lower slopes lay in evening shadow, and only they on the summit remained, as if en-chanted, in a circle of fairy gold.
One evening while they sat there a half-witted contadino slouched out of the chapel and begged from them. Chester refused sharply, and turned his face away. The imbecile hung about, mouthed a confused prayer, bowing and crossing, before the shrine, got no help from that quarter either, and at last shambled disconsolately down the hillside, crooning an unintelligible song to himself.