6

The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams.  The steep tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea.  Sometimes they would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for the night, and bathe and sail till evening.  When they bathed, Nan would swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters, slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action, drowning emotion in the sea.

Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and had to battle for the shore.  Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this meant a tough fight.

“Barry!”

Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda’s bluing face and wide staring eyes and quickening, flurried strokes.  Saw, too, Barry at once at her side, heard his “All right, I’m here.  Catch hold of my shoulder.”

In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda’s other side.

“Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you’re worth with your legs.  That’s the way....”

Numbly Gerda’s two hands gripped Barry’s right shoulder and Nan’s left.  Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily, helping the running sea against them.  They were being swept westward towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck northward and northward and were carried always south.  It was a close thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the current was winning.

“It’ll have to be all we know now,” said Nan, as they struggled ten yards from the point.

She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew and just the little more they didn’t know—­they would be swept round the point well to the south of the outermost rock—­and then, hey for open sea!

But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle, stronger than the sea.  They were swept towards the jutting point, almost round it, when Nan, flinging forward to the right, caught a slippery ledge of rock with her two hands and held on.  Barry didn’t think she could hold on for more than a second against the swinging seas, or, if she did, could consolidate her position.  But he did not know the full power of Nan’s trained, acrobatic body.  Slipping her shoulder from Gerda’s clutch, she grasped instead Gerda’s right hand in her left, and with her other arm and with all her sinuous, wiry strength, heaved herself onto the rock and there flung her body flat, reaching out her free hand to Barry.  Barry caught it just in time, as he was being swung on a wave outwards, and pulled himself within grip of the rock, and in another moment he lay beside her, and between them they hauled up Gerda.