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He could see the whole scene: the tiny cove, with the violet shadow of the cliff sleeping on the green water; the swell of the waves lazily lapping against the diving-board from which he had plunged half an hour before; he remembered the long swim out to the buoy; the exhilarated anticipation with which he had dressed and climbed the steep path to the hotel terrace.
Here is an average billet, and its personnel. Its abundant contents are apparently the sole asset of the household; for if you proceed, in the interests of health, to spread a decent mantle of honest earth thereover, you do so to the accompaniment of a harmonised chorus of lamentation, very creditably rendered by the entire family, who are grouped en masse about the spot where the high diving-board ought to be.
A plank, like a diving-board, had been run out on trestles in front of the caravan, and along this the assistant darted forwards and backwards on a level with the shoulders of the good-humoured crowd, his arms full of clocks, saucepans, china ornaments, mirrors, feather brushes, teapots, sham jewellery.
When this was done, the Doctor had a long low shed built and thatched and supplied with form-like seats, and a diving-board arranged, beside steps down in the shallow part for the younger boys, and the whole when finished made a glorious long pool of about an acre in extent, very deep by the dam, and sloping gradually up to a few inches only of water where the stream trickled in.
It has a vital momentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown. The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or total nature, because it has no end.
"Better wait a year or two, Top," said Simmons, deliberately turning a somersault. "I'm bovvered if I do!" cried Toppin, scampering round to the diving-board. He was in a state of great excitement. "I'm going to dive, and turn head over heels, and stamp in the water, just like you." "Oh, let the nipper see what he can do!" said Armitage, laughing. He was standing on the diving-board.
Fredi's pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of elegant build hard by. Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed with birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and evening had a fair face of water to paint.
I sought cover in a small shed called a bath-house and got into my swimming outfit and shot out from the dipping end of the diving-board into the water. When I came to the surface, Silvia, sitting beside Diogenes on the dock, shrieked wildly. "Oh, Lucien, there are snakes all around you! Come out, quick!" "They are only water snakes," I assured her. "I don't care what kind they are.
"C'est convenable, j'espère hein?" she murmurs, and her bald-headed cicisbeo, who has taken possession of her sheet, hastens to assure her that all is well. Whereupon, her doubts thus happily set at rest, she wades out to the diving-board, mounts it leisurely, stands poised for an instant at the outermost end, and then dives gracefully into the expectant billows.
Then there would be the pad, pad, pad, pad of naked feet, as a boy ran along the diving-board, sprang out, and then splash he would be into the water. And so it went on, with some tiring, and going and sitting in the sun, which played the part of warm towel, till they would come in again, for it was declared to be the most delightful day we had had.
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