“Oh! I don’t know!” said Tony, flinging his arms about. “I’m much too happy to care. Maradick, I’ve been seeing her, here in the gorse—wonderful—divine. We will go back to-morrow; yes, we must. Of course you’ve got to come. As to everybody’s good temper, that doesn’t mean anything. The spirits of the place have their games, you know, and there we are. Everybody will be awfully cross at tea. And you know it is cheek! For us all to go and plant our tent and eat our chicken in the middle of a view like this. And they’ll leave paper bags about, and they’ll pop ginger-beer. I don’t mind betting that the gods play some games before they’ve done with us.”
They climbed down the rocks to a little cove that lay nestling under the brow of the hill. The sand was white, with little sparkles in it where the sun caught the pebbles; everything was coloured with an intensity that hurt the eye. The cove was hemmed in by brown rocks; a little bird hopped along the sand, then rose with a little whirl of pleasure above their heads and disappeared.
They flung off their clothes with an entire disregard of possible observers. A week ago Maradick would have died rather than do such a thing; a bathing-machine and a complete bathing-suit had been absolute essentials, now they really never entered his head. If he had thought of it at all, they would have seemed to him distinctly indecent, a kind of furtive winking of the eye, an eager disavowal of an immorality that was never there at all.
As Maradick felt the water about his body his years fell from him like Pilgrim’s pack. He sank down, with his eyes for a moment on the burning sky, and then gazing through depths of green water. As he cleaved it with his arm it parted and curled round his body like an embrace; for a moment he was going down and down and down, little diamond bubbles flying above him, then he was up again, and, for an instant, the dazzling white of the cove, the brown of the rocks, the blue of the sky, encircled him. Then he lay on his back and floated. His body seemed to leave him, and he was something utterly untrammelled and free; there were no Laws, no Creeds, no Arguments, nothing but a wonderful peace and contentment, an absolute union with something that he had been searching for all his life and had never found until now.
“Obey we Mother Earth . . . Mother Earth.” He lay, smiling, on her breast. Little waves came and danced beneath him, touching his body with a caress as they passed him; he rose and fell, a very gentle rocking, as of some mother with her child. He could not think, he could remember nothing; he only knew that he had solved a riddle.
Then he struck out to sea. Before him it seemed to spread without end or limit; it was veiled in its farthest distance by a thin purple haze, and out of this curtain the blue white-capped waves danced in quick succession towards him. He struck out and out, and as he felt his body cut through the water a great exultation rose in him that he was still so strong and vigorous. Every part of him, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, seemed clean and sound and sane. Oh! Life! with its worries and its dirty little secrets and its petty moralities! and the miserable pessimistic sauntering in a melancholy twilight through perpetual graveyards! Let them swim, let them swim!
He shouted to Tony, “It’s great. One could go on for ever!” He dived for a moment downward, and saw the great white curve of his body from his foot to the hip, the hard smooth strength of the flesh.
Then he turned slowly back. The white beach, the brown rocks, and the blue sky held out hands to him.
“All those people,” he shouted to Tony, “up there, eating, sleeping, when they might be in this!” Mrs. Lester, he knew, would have liked it. He thought for a moment of his wife, the dresses she would need and the frills. He could see her stepping delicately from the bathing-machine; her little scream as her feet touched the water, “Oh Jim! it’s cold!” He laughed as he waded back on to the beach. The pebbles burnt hot under his feet, and the sand clung to his toes; he dug his legs deep into it. The sun curled about his body and wrapped him, as it were, in a robe of its own glorious colour. He could feel it burning on his back.
Tony joined him, panting. “Oh! my word! I’ve never had such a bathe, never! I could have stayed in for ever! But they’d be coming to look for us, and that wouldn’t do. I say, run round with me! I’ll beat you five times round.”