Swing, Swing Together Read Free

towards the smallest island, there was a chance of getting a foothold on the silt that must have accumulated around its base.
    With a determined thrashing of arms and legs she started across the current towards the eyot. She was immediately turned over like a log, but righted herself and tried again at a less ambitious angle to the flow. Several times she started to sink but managed to rear up, and when her strength was all but spent and she submerged again, she felt her knees touch firm mud. She was in three feet of water.
    How long she remained kneeling in the shallows waiting for the pumping of her heart to return to normal Harriet was in no state to estimate. She was not surprised that by the time she remembered the existence of the three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) and turned to look for them, they were nowhere in sight. If they had noticed her in the water they had not demonstrated much concern for her plight. Two, she remembered, had been rowing and would have had their backs to her. The third had sunk downwards somewhat in the cushions at the other end and may well have been asleep. If that was so, then the panic in the water must have been unnecessary. Jane and Molly, for all their experience of the world at large, had plunged like porpoises at the first sight of the opposite sex.
    Pleasing as that recollection was, it did not alter the fact that Harriet was marooned without her clothes, wet and shivering on a small island in the Thames.
    Well, she would look upon it as a test of character. “A teacher must be equal to each situation, however unpredictable,” Miss Plummer frequently reminded her students, although the Plum’s wildest vision of the unpredictable was walking into a classroom and finding no chalk there. Resolutely, Harriet heaved herself onto the island, a narrow strip entirely covered by reeds, waist-high. Some small creature scuttled into the water, putting her nerves to the test at once. Harriet crossed the spine of the eyot with the high, fastidious steps of a wading bird, and entered the water on the other side.
    A channel no more than fifteen feet in width separated her from the riverbank. Feeling no excessive pressure from the current, she ventured to the level of her thighs and found she could reach the bough of an overhanging willow. She twisted it round her wrist, took a deep breath and set off for the opposite bank with all the strength she had left. At its deepest point the water reached her chin, but she gripped the willow tightly and kept moving until she was clear and safely up the bank.
    There, another test of character awaited her. She found as she stood upright that her way was obstructed by an uncountable number of thin metal struts radiating from a common center. It was like looking into an ornamental bird cage large enough to house a peacock, but the creature on the other side was not feathered or exotic: it was a policeman, shining his bull’s-eye lantern through the fore-wheel of a penny-farthing bicycle.

CHAPTER
    4
    A towpath dialogue—Short digression on diabolical practices—A constable’s consideration
    â€œW OULD YOU BE REQUIRING assistance, miss?” he gently inquired in the dialect rarely heard by the sheltered community at Elfrida College.
    â€œOh!” Her hands moved with a speed that would have drawn a cry of admiration from a drill sergeant. “It would oblige me if you would point your lantern in some other direction.”
    â€œCertainly, miss. Been swimmin’, have you? ’Tis nothin’ unusual to drift downstream a little. Where are you from?”
    She hesitated, reluctant to throw herself on his mercy, but recoiling from telling a lie to the Law. Candour triumphed. “I belong to the training college. I was taking a midnight bathe. My clothes are half a mile that way.” She indicated the direction with a small movement of her head.
    â€œThen you’d better put my tunic about you.