"That's ripping. I say, shall I drive with you to the station just as I am? Why shouldn't I? Pyjamas and dressing-gown are perfectly decent if William will fetch me my slippers, which I seem to have forgotten, unless he lends me his boots."
"Your bath's ready, my lord," said William with a broad grin.
"Well, perhaps I'll have it then. Good-bye, Jess. Come early on
Saturday."
CHAPTER XI
Archie was lying on the turf in front of the enclosed bathing-place where the stream debouched into the lake. There was a good stretch of deep water free from weeds, and for the last half-hour he had been swimming and diving in it. Now, with hair drying back into its crisp curls under the hot sun, he lay on the short warm turf, with his chin supported on his hands, in an ecstasy of animal content. At this edge of the water the bank was made firm and solid with wooden boarding that went down into deep water, but across the estuary of the stream, broadening out into the lake, the shallow margin was fringed with bulrushes and loosestrife. A strip of low-lying meadow land behind was pink with campion and ragged-robin and starred with meadow-sweet, the scent of which mingled with the undefinable cool smell of running water. A bed of gravel made the bottom of the stream, and through the sunlit water the pebbles gleamed like topazes through some liquid veil.
Never before had Archie been so permeated with the sense of the amazing loveliness of the world, and of the ineffable joy of living and of being part of it. He had wrestled with the swiftness of the stream as it narrowed, had clung to rocks and tree-roots below the surface, letting the current comb over and around and almost through him, then, letting go of his anchorage, had been floated down into the lake again with arms and legs outspread, and now, lying close-pressed to the turf with wet chest and dripping shoulders, he seemed to be part of the triumph of the summer, and of the immortal youth of the world. Surely there was no further heaven than this possible, namely, to be young and to desire and to have desire gratified, and whet the appetite for more. There was no clearer duty in the day than to be bathed in the bliss of life, to suck out the last drop of sweetness from the world which had been created for the joy of men and the glory of God. There was no such thing as evil; evil was but the label attached by the sour-minded to the impulses and acts for which they had not sufficient vitality… And it was Martin who had taught him all this.
Archie had come back home this morning after a day and a couple of nights in town. He had bought Helena her wedding present, he had taken his completed manuscript to his publishers, he had dined and danced and supped, and filled the hours of day and night with the extravagant excesses in which up till now he had never indulged. Some innate fastidiousness or morality had led him to look on the looser pleasures of youth with disdain or disgust; now he smiled indulgently at himself for his narrow priggishness. How utterly wrong he had been to think that such things stained or soiled a boy; they had but caused him to realize himself and intensified existence for him. They were the exercise of the faculties and possibilities with which God had endowed him, and which were not meant to rust in disuse. It was right for him "richly to enjoy," as Martin had said: it was a crime against love and life to starve on a meatless diet… Above all, he had seen Helena again, had confessed and recanted the bitterness he had felt towards her, and she had forgiven him, and welcomed him back "with blessings on the falling out, that all the more endears," as the prim little poem said.
Archie laughed quietly to himself and said aloud:
"When we fall out with those we love,
And kiss again with tears."
"But there weren't many tears," he added.