“Don’t know. I’m going to bathe on my own, anyhow. David, there’s a sharp line round your neck, where your clothes begin, when you’ve got any, as if you’d painted your neck with the sprain-stuff, Iodine.”
“I did,” said David fatuously, standing nude. “Come on; the ripping old sea’s waiting for us.”
The tide was high and the beach steep, so that a few steps across the belt of sand all a-tremble in the heat, and a few strokes into the cool, tingling water, were sufficient to snatch them away from all solid things, and give them the buoyancy of liquid existences. The sea slept in the windlessness of this August weather, and, as if with long-taken breaths, a silence and alternate whisper of ripple broke along its rims. Far out a fleet of herring-boats with drooping sails hovered like grey-winged gulls; above, an unclouded sun shone on the shining watery plains, and on the two wet heads, one black, one yellow, that moved out seawards with side-stroke flashings of white arms clawing the sea, amid a smother of foam. Farther and farther they moved out, till at last David rolled over in the water, and floated on his back.
“Oh, ripping,” he said. “Good old mother sea!”
Frank turned over also and lay alongside.
“It’s like something I read yesterday,” he said. “ ‘As the heart of us—oh, something and something—athirst for the foam.’ I seem to remember it well, don’t I?”
“Yes. What is it, anyhow? Who did it?”
“Fellow called Swinburne. Good man is Swinburne, at times. Lord, you can lie down on the sea like a sofa, if you get your balance right. Oh, dear me, yes; Swinburne knows a trick or two. For instance, ‘when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow and plain fills the shadows and windy places with lisp of leaves and ripple of rain. And the bright brown nightingale’—oh, how does it go?”
He lay with head a-wash, and eyes half closed against the glare, and the spell of the magical words framed itself more distinctly in his mind.