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.
Gerda gasped “Kay,” and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.
“Can you do it?” Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.
“Let you know presently. … Oh yes, I’m all right. Getting on fine.”
Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay’s swimming and the sea. It seemed to her to be anyone’s race.
Barry didn’t stand up. The strain of the swim had been rather too much for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side. He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.
The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat Kay in this race. For Kay’s face had turned a curious colour, and he was blue round the lips. Kay’s heart was not strong.
Nan’s dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish to see. The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay’s side. Coming up she caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder, saying “Hold tight. A few strokes will do it.”
Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight, throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other three limbs.
They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry’s outstretched hand been ready. Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and no more, as they were swung seawards. It was enough. It pulled them to the rock’s side. Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.
“Neat,” said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay. “My word, Nan, you’re a sportsman.”
“He does faint sometimes,” said Gerda of Kay. “He’ll be all right in a minute.”
Kay came to.
“Oh Lord,” he said, “that was a bit of a grind.” And then, becoming garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently swooned, “Couldn’t have done it without you, Nan. I’d given myself up for lost. All my past life went by me in a flash. … I really did think it was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us, wasn’t it? … Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course. It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I’ve drunk! I do feel rotten.”
“We all look pretty rotten, I must say,” Nan commented, looking from Kay’s limp greenness to Gerda’s shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry, prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs cut by rocks in the sea. “I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?”
“We’re not well enough for anything,” Barry returned. “But we’d better do it. We don’t want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp way.”
They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along
