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Polo and an occasional jackal hunt, cricket and football, and all kinds of foot sports kept us fit, but the most enjoyable time of all was in the swimming-baths. When we first went there, there was only a small swimming-bath built for the officials of the Western Oasis Corporation, which was reserved for officers and for sergeants twice a week.
'Don't you see that they have come out of the swimming-baths? It supplies me with a motive for the nude; it's a real find, eh? Does it shock you? His old friend, who knew him well by now, dreaded lest he should give him cause for discouragement. 'I? Oh, no! Only I am afraid that the public will again fail to understand. That nude woman in the very midst of Paris it's improbable.
In the Tuileries Gardens flowers, grass, and trees were drenched in dew, the great shadow of the Palace spread grey and cool over terraces and slopes, while beyond the young sun had already shaken off all cumbering mists, and was pouring from a cloudless sky over the river with its barges and swimming-baths, over the bridges and the quays, and the vast courts and facades of the Louvre.
In addition to the constant walks which I took with my father, he encouraged me to join a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to Huguenin's gymnasium in Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths, and to a dancing-academy kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he bought me an enormous steel hoop, and set me racing after it at headlong speed.
And to these the Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law courts, theatres; such astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock banks, lending libraries, and art schools; and whole monumental streets and squares from the designs of a native architect without whose respectable name no history of British architecture could be called complete.
Pliny says of these works: "If any one will carefully consider the quantity of water used in the open air, in private baths, swimming-baths, houses, gardens, &c., and thinks of the arches that have been built, the hills that have been tunnelled, and the valleys that have been levelled for the purpose of conducting the water to its destination, he must confess that nothing has existed in the world more calculated to excite admiration."
I was only six years old, but I remember distinctly that when Ludo and I were taken to the Lutz swimming-baths next day, we found first on the drill-ground, then on the bank of the Spree, and in the water, charred pieces, large and small, of the side-scenes of the theatre. They were the glowing birds whose flight I had watched from the tower of the Crede house.
They had been in the water long enough, for their teeth were chattering and they could hardly get into their clothes for trembling. 'I say, began Harry with chattering teeth, 'you fellows ought to learn to tread water and to swim on the side. They teach these things at the swimming-baths. The ordinary kind of swimming does well enough in a place like this
The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first, and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute in these parts!
While this was doing the four boats got through the lock, and Rowles came back to talk to his friends. "I suppose you can swim?" he said to Mitchell. "Yes; and so can my boy Albert. Swimming-baths in London, you know, where you get clean and learn to swim all in one." "A better bath here," returned Rowles, "and nothing to pay."
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