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.”
They raced round the beach. The sun, the wind, and the waves seemed to go with them; the water fell from them as they ran, and at last they flung themselves dry and breathless on to the hot sand.
Whilst they dressed, Tony dealt with the situation more practically and in detail.
“There are going to be a lot of difficulties, I’m afraid,” he said, as he stood with his shirt flapping about his legs, and his hands struggling with his collar. “In the first place, there’s mother. As I told you, she’s not got to know anything about it, because the minute she hears anything officially, of course, she’ll have to step in and ask about it, and then there’ll be no end of trouble with the governor and everybody. It’s not that she disapproves really, you know—your being there makes that all right; but she hasn’t got to realise it until it’s done. She won’t ask anything about it, but of course she can’t help wondering.”
“Well, I hope it is all right,” said Maradick anxiously. “My being a kind of moral danger-signal makes one nervous.”
“Oh! she trusts you,” said Tony confidently. “That’s why it’s so perfectly splendid your being there. And then,” went on Tony, “they are all of them wondering what we are at. You see, Treliss has that effect on people, or at any rate it’s having that kind of effect on us here and now. Everybody is feeling uneasy about something, and they are most of them putting it down to me. Things always do happen when you jumble a lot of people together in a hotel, the gods can’t resist a game; and when you complicate it by putting them in Treliss! My word!”