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He sat down on a bench beside the water and listened to the plash of the waves; a light breeze rustled through the flowering maple trees .... There lay twenty, thirty boats moored beside the quay, tugging at their chains .... Wind and wave seemed to urge them on and they rushed forward .... but the chains jerked them back and so they champed and kicked as if eager to break away.
August Strindberg, The Red Room, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, J.M. Dent & Son, London, 1967, (Everyman Edition), p. 12.
TIME: 1879
PLACE: Stockholm
A prefect idyll was revealed. A cock sat on the shafts of a water-cart and crowed: the watch-dog lay in the sunshine catching flies; the bees hung in a cloud round the bee-hives; the gardener was on his knees by the hot-beds, pricking out radishes; the warblers and redstarts were singing in the gooseberry bushes; half-naked children chased the fowls....
August Strindberg, The Red Room, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, J.M. Dent & Son, London, 1967, (Everyman Edition), p. 22.
TIME: 1879.
PLACE: countryside outside Stockholm
The thin man was reading in a dry monotonous tone that lacked all resonance, and the fat one signified his satisfaction from time to time with a snort that sometimes changed into a grunt and finally ended in spitting, when the words of wisdom to which he was listening went beyond ordinary human understanding.
August Strindberg, The Red Room, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, J.M. Dent & Son, London, 1967, (Everyman Edition), p. 23.
TIME: 1879
PLACE: countryside outside Stockholm
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