The esplanade at St. Kilda lay grilling under the heat, the yellow sand of the beach contrasting sharply with the wilted green of the strip of garden and lawn that lies between the roadway and the shore. Beyond gleamed a grey expanse of sea, its surface not marked by the tiniest wave until it broke in lazy ripples on the beach, where hundreds of children were bathing and paddling. The sands were churned into hills and hollows by innumerable feet: greasy lunch-papers littered them, with crumpled bags that had once held cakes and fruit. Rows of deck-chairs bore the forms of slumbering grown-ups; here and there a mother roused herself to shout to Tommy and Winnie that they were going too far into the water and had better come out, now, and behave. Babies crawled everywhere, fighting, falling over, and eating sand and strange treasure-trove of the littered beach. As the girls watched, one crawled straight into the sea, laughing gleefully at the warm touch of the shallow water. A half-naked little brother pursued it, shouting threats and dragged it up the sand, fulfilling his promise of a smack. The baby howled distressfully, and the mother stirred to say, “Now, Willie, whatcher doin’? Couldn’t yer let ’er alone for ’arf a minute?” She gave the annoyed baby a cake, and the baby ceased howling, and fell upon it wolfishly, its joy in it not at all disturbed by the fact that between bites it generally fell into the sand. Willie also seized a cake, and departed, with the puzzled air of one who, having done his duty, receives no commendation. The mother slumbered again.
“Don’t you hate city beaches?” Jo asked; and Jean nodded.
“Think of Anderson’s Inlet beside this,” said Nita, “up at the Eagle’s Rest, with the tide coming in and filling all those jolly rock-pools. Clean, hard sand that you can gallop a horse along; and such bathing. It’s like soda-water to bathe in at night, all sparkle and foam, and you just tingle all over after it!”
“I know,” Gladys said. “I was nearly washed out by a wave on those rocks one day: it came unexpectedly when I’d just been taking photographs, a sort of lone wave that rushed in ever so much farther than any of its mates. I had to hang on like grim death, and it washed the rock clear of everything but me. Camera, book, lunch-basket—they all went off to the Antarctic: and I had five miles to walk home, soaked to the skin. It was jolly!”
“It sounds jolly,” said Helen, laughing. “It’s almost hard to believe there are waves like that when you’re looking at that tame sea in front of us—it looks as if it were made of grey oil.”
“Grey oil or not, it’s all we’ve got to-day, and I won’t have it abused,” Ellen Webster said. “Come on, girls; we’re wasting precious time.” She led the way along the pier that led out to the baths.
There were scores of bobbing heads in the water within. At the shallow end the sea seemed full of small girls, splashing about within their depths; and every inch of the rope that stretched across from side to side, where the water was three feet deep, was occupied by clinging hands, whose owners swung themselves up and down in the waves with shrieks of delight. The shallower the water, the more incessant were the screams of the bathers. Farther out they became quieter, though wild yells rose from one place where a band of mermaids played a kind of water-polo with a huge ball. In the deep water at the extreme end, peace reigned: only a few strong swimmers were to be seen there, moving quietly along, or floating lazily. A big, black-backed gull perched on a water-worn post, crusted with barnacles, and gazed at the scene, probably reflecting that nothing so queer was likely to meet his vision again between there and the South Pole.
A railed gallery ran round the baths, overlooking the water. Dressing-boxes opened from it, trails of wet foot-marks leading from them to the flights of steps that gave access to the sea. The gallery was crowded with onlookers, among whom forms in bathing-suits, wet and dry, edged swiftly, with due regard for bare feet among the many shod. Occasionally a soaked bather, hurrying to dress, cannoned into an immaculate damsel in a crisp frock, greatly to the destruction of her crispness. The crowd of spectators was thickest near a spring-board jutting out over the deep water, where a girl capered gaily, making the board leap up and down until it fairly bucked her off. She turned a double somersault in mid-air before she struck the water.
“That’s Alice Pearce,” said Nita. “I heard she’d broken six spring-boards this season. It must be an expensive amusement.”
“Wouldn’t you just love to be able to dive like that, Jo?” Jean murmured; and her twin breathed, “Rather!”