“What’s the use of waking him when he’s fagged? Besides, he’s got to wash and dress his baby, and give him his bottle, so he wouldn’t have time. Aren’t you ready?”
“Yes,” said Heathcote, flinging himself into his hardly-regained garments.
The “Templeton Tub,” as the bathing place was colloquially termed, was a small natural harbour among the rocks at the foot of the cliff on which the school stood. It was a picturesque spot at all times; but this bright spring morning, with the distant headlands lighting up in the rising sunlight, and the blue sea heaving lazily among the rocks as though not yet awake, Heathcote thought it one of the prettiest places he had ever seen.
The “Tub” suited all sorts of bathers. The little timid waders could dip their toes and splash their hair in the shallow basin in-shore. The more advanced could wade out shoulder-deep, and puff and flounder with one foot on the ground and the other up above their heads, and delude the world into the notion they were swimming. For others there was the spring-board, from which to take a header into deep water; and, further out still, the rocks rose in ledges, where practised divers could take the water from any height they liked, from four feet to thirty. Except with leave, no boy was permitted to swim beyond the harbour mouth into the open. But leave was constantly being applied for, and as constantly granted; and perhaps every boy, at some time or other, cast wistful glances at the black buoy bobbing a mile out at sea, and wondered when he, like Pontifex and Mansfield, and other of the Sixth, should be able to wear the image of it on his belt, and call himself a Templeton “shark?”
Heathcote, on his first appearance at the “Tub,” acquitted himself creditably. He took a mild header from the spring-board without more than ordinary splashing, and swam across the pool and back in fair style. Gosse, who only went in from the low ledge, and swam half-way across and back, was good enough to give him some very good advice, and promise to make a good swimmer of him in time. Whereat Heathcote looked grateful, and wished Dick had been there to astonish some of them.
One or two of the Fifth, including Swinstead and Birket, arrived as the youngsters were dressing.
“Hallo!” said Swinstead to Heathcote, “you here? Where’s your chum?”
“Asleep,” said Heathcote, quite pleased to think he should be able to tell Dick he had been having a talk with Swinstead that morning.
“Have you been in?”
“Yes.”