The stream was shallow and broken up with boulders: no use for bathing.
‘Let’s follow it, Julian. We’ll find something, I know.’
Soon it took a turn deeper into the wood’s heart, and began to grow in depth and volume; then all at once plunged in a smooth gentle cascade into a wide rock basin. There it had pause, deep and silent, before dropping again at the basin’s further edge in a sheer plumed column, and racing on downwards, and downwards again.
‘Oh, Julian, what a bathing-pool! Is it possible? Look at that colour I ask you. Is it limestone?’
The whole circular sweep of the rock shimmered in faint silver through the dim bluish depth of water.
‘And deep enough to dive into, Julian—if we dare break into such fairiness.... What do you suppose lives here? It may put a spell on us.... I don’t care! I long to be spell-bound. Don’t you think, if one plunged in, one might come out all silver-blue and cold and gleaming? I’d love to walk through the hotel lounge naked like that, with long blue dripping hair! Oh, come on, Julian—let’s both try! I’ve had no luck for ages, have you? Perhaps it’s turned to-day. You undress here and I’ll go behind this bush and talk to you out of it, like God. Come—off with our lendings!’
And, in a flash, with the uttering of the last words, Jennifer came back, slipping the clothes down off white shoulder and breast, talking and laughing. A tide of memories; Jennifer’s head burning in the sunlight, her body stooping towards the water—the whole of those May terms of hawthorn blossom and cowslips, of days like a warm drowsy wine, days bewildered with growing up and loving Jennifer, with reading Donne and Webster and Marlowe, with dreaming of Roddy.... Where had it all gone—Where was Jennifer?—Whom enchanting now?—How faintly remembering Judith? Compared with that tumultuous richness, how sickly, how wavering was this present feeling—what a sorry pretense! Would one ever be happy again?
Julian, lean and hairy in his bathing-suit, was already feeling the water with his toe when she emerged and, spurring her flagging spirits, leapt down through the bushes, paused a moment beside him, cried ‘Ah!’ and dived into liquid twilight.
He plunged in after her, and they came up together, ‘You shouldn’t have dived like that,’ he cried. ‘Don’t do it again. There’s a great jag of rock just below where you went in,—you might have hit your head. You’re a very naughty girl.’
‘Pooh!’ She splashed and kicked round him, and went swimming close under the waterfall, feeling its weight press down and bubble upon her shoulder. The water was cold: the sun could never reach it save in light flecks through leafy branches. The pouring of the falls made a soft, full, lapsing speech. Nothing in the world was so smooth as the polished silk of their down-curving necks.