Amnesiacs -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
A six-shilling volume might be written about the New Hotel, with an
execration on every page. Don't let us have anything to do with it,
but keep as much as possible at the Sea Houses under the cliff, which
constitute the only St. Sennans necessary to this story. We shall be
able to do so, because when Mrs. and Mr. Fenwick and their daughter
went for a walk they always went up the cliff-pathway, which had steps
cut in the chalk, past the boat upside down, where new-laid eggs could
be bought from a coastguard's wife. And this path avoided the New Town
altogether, and took them straight to the cliff-track that skirted
growing wheat and blazing poppies till you began to climb the smooth
hill-pasture the foolish wheat had encroached upon in the Protection
days, when it was worth more than South Down mutton. And now every ear
of it would have been repenting in sackcloth and ashes if it had been
qualified by Nature to know how little it would fetch per bushel. But
it wasn't. And when, the day after their arrival, Rosalind and her
husband were on the beach talking of taking a walk up that way when
Sally came out, it could have heard, if it would only have stood
still, the sheep-bells on the slopes above reproaching it, and
taunting it with its usurpation and its fruitless end. Perhaps it was
because it felt ashamed that it stooped before the wind that carried
the reproachful music, and drowned it in a silvery rustle. The barley
succeeded the best. You listen to the next July barley-field you
happen on, and hear what it can do when a breeze comes with no noise
of its own.
Down below on the shingle the sun was hot, and the tide was high, and
the water was clear and green close to the shore, and jelly-fish
abounded. You could look down into the green from the last steep ridge
at high-water mark, and if you looked sharp you might see one abound.
Only you had to be on the alert to jump back if a heave of the green
transparency surged across the little pebbles that could gobble it up
before it was all over your feet--but didn't this time. Oh dear!--how
hot it was! Sally had the best of it. For the allusion to Sally's
"coming out" referred to her coming out of the water, and she was
staying in a long time.
"That child's been twenty-four minutes already," said her mother,
consulting her watch. "Just look at her out there on the horizon. What
on earth _are_ they doing?"
It _was_ a little inexplicable. At that moment Sally and her
friend--it was one Fraeulein Braun, who had learned swimming in the
baths on the Rhone at Geneva and in Paris--appeared to be nothing but
two heads, one close behind the other, moving slowly on the water.
Then the heads parted company, and apparently their owners lay on
their backs in the water, and kicked up the British Channel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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