When, in an astounding short space of time, he stood in the King's Road
at Brighton, it seemed to him that he was in a dream; that he was not
really at Brighton, that town which for so many years had been to him
naught but a romantic name. Had his adventurousness, his foolhardiness,
indeed carried him so far? As for Brighton, it corresponded with no
dream. It was vaster than any imagining of it. Edwin had only seen the
pleasure cities of the poor and of the middling, such as Blackpool and
Llandudno. He had not conceived what wealth would do when it organised
itself for the purposes of distraction. The train had prepared him to a
certain extent, but not sufficiently. He suddenly saw Brighton in its
autumnal pride, Brighton beginning one of its fine week-ends, and he had
to admit that the number of rich and idle people in the world surpassed
his provincial notions. For miles westwards and miles eastwards,
against a formidable background of high, yellow and brown architecture,
persons the luxuriousness of any one of whom would have drawn remarks in
Bursley, walked or drove or rode in thronging multitudes. Edwin could
comprehend lolling by the sea in August, but in late October it seemed
unnatural, fantastic. The air was full of the trot of glossy horses and
the rattle of bits and the roll of swift wheels, and the fall of elegant
soles on endless clean pavements; it was full of the consciousness of
being correct and successful. Many of the faces were monstrously ugly,
most were dissatisfied and querulous; but they were triumphant. Even
the pale beings in enlarged perambulators, pulled solemnly to and fro by
their aged fellow-beings, were triumphant. The scared, the maimed, yes,
and the able-bodied blind trusting to the arms of friends, were
triumphant. And the enormous policemen, respectfully bland, confident
in the system which had chosen them and fattened them, gave as it were
to the scene an official benediction.
The bricks and stucco which fronted the sea on the long embanked
promenade never sank lower than a four-storey boarding-house, and were
continually rising to the height of some gilt-lettered hotel, and at
intervals rose sheer into the skies--six, eight, ten storeys--where a
hotel, admittedly the grandest on any shore of ocean sent terra-cotta
chimneys to lose themselves amid the pearly clouds. Nearly every
building was a lodgement waiting for the rich, and nearly every great
bow-window, out of tens of thousands of bow-windows bulging forward in
an effort to miss no least glimpse of the full prospect, exhibited the
apparatus and the menials of gourmandise. And the eye, following the
interminable irregular horizontal lines of architecture, was foiled in
the far distances, and, still farther off, after a break of
indistinguishable brown, it would catch again the receding run of roofs,
simplified by atmosphere into featureless rectangles of grey against
sapphire or rose. There were two piers that strode and sprawled into
the sea, and these also were laden with correctness and with domination.
And, between the two, men were walking miraculously on the sea to build
a third, that should stride farther and deeper than the others.
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