“Well, twenty strokes then,” said the wily David, shoving from Frank’s shoulder to get a movement on, and then, taking very long, slow strokes, letting his impetus exhaust itself.
“Now,” he said.
Both boys swam with the overhand side-stroke, breathing whenever their heads happened to be above water, and ploughed landwards with waves of bubble and broken water behind them. Frank overtook the other in the last thrilling ten yards, won by the length of an arm and a head, and panting, but still cool, they lay for a little in the shallow water, and then reluctantly went up over the beach to where their clothes lay. There the hot sun soon rendered superfluous the towels Frank had been at pains to fetch, and presently after they laboured up the sandy path to the house, slack and hungry and content, with the half of the wonderful day still in front of them. Once on the upward ascent David paused, his mind going back to the magic of words.
“O-o-oh,” he said again rapturously. “ ‘Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’ I shall read some more of that after lunch.”
Lunch took a considerable time, for David’s appetite, like his bones and muscles, seemed but to grow larger with the food he ate, and it was not till he had taken Frank’s evil advice and drunk a second bottle of ginger-beer that he declared himself able to turn his attention to literature again. They were going to play golf once more in half an hour, and David staggered out on to the lawn to lie on the shady terrace-bank for a short spell of Swinburne, which Frank went to fetch from his bedroom. Letters had arrived during lunch, and he found one for himself and one for David, which with Swinburne and the daily paper that would contain one important matter, namely, the result of the county match between Sussex and Surrey, he took out with him.
“There’s a letter for you,” he said, “and there’s Swinburne and the Daily Telegraph. What order of merit?”
“Oh, Telegraph first,” said David. “I bet you that Surrey—oh, this letter’s from Margery. Might just see what’s going on. I say, I know exactly how a balloon feels. But it was jolly good ginger-beer.”
Frank flopped down on the bank by him, and began opening his letter.
“What else do you expect,” he said, “if you inflate yourself with gas, as you did at lunch?”
“Don’t expect anything else,” said David thickly. “And it was you who suggested it. I think I must see what happened in the match first.”