Page:Across the Stream.djvu/137

Rh something pellucid and immortal. Dying would be like that, dying was no more than being poured into this jubilant ocean, and becoming part of its clean, exuberant life.…

But Archie had no intention of dying just yet, and indeed these metaphysical speculations only reached him like the sound of chimes blown across the water, while far clearer was Harry's voice, calling from the beach, "Archie, it's after twelve"; and thereupon Archie would turn on his chest and swim back to land, with a frill of foam encircling his sunburnt throat and a wake of bubbles following the strokes of his strong legs. Thereafter he would cast himself onto the beach with a straw hat tipped over his eyes, and his suntanned legs and arms spread star-fish fashion, and lie there drinking in the sun, while Harry and Jessie reviled him for causing lunch, for which they hungered, to be again half an hour behind the scheduled time. And Archie, lighting a cigarette, turned on his elbow and called them greedy hogs for thinking about lunch, when it was possible to lie in the sun, and swim in the sea. Then, as likely as not, he would himself be aware of a celestial appetite, and step into a pair of flannel trousers and a sea-stained shirt, and in turn revile their tardiness in climbing the olived terraces that lay between them and the Castello.

They lunched in the garden, in a strip of shade outside the house, and thereafter, without any pretence at all about the matter, Harry and Jessie went to their rooms for an honest Italian siesta, with no excuse of lying on beds and reading, but with the avowed object of lying on beds and sleeping. But this two hours' swimming and basking and communion with the sea, instead of making Archie sleepy, gave him his most productive hours of work, and wide-eyed and eager he would sit with jotted notes and scribbling-paper round him, read over the last few pages of his current