The hotel fronted north on an old sheltered square where no storm raged,
but simultaneously with Edwin's first glimpse of the sea the wind struck
him a tremendous blow, and continued to strike. He had the peculiar
grim joy of the Midlander and Northerner in defying an element. All the
lamps of the promenade were insecurely flickering. Grouped opposite a
small jetty was a crowd of sightseers. The dim extremity of the jetty
was wreathed in spray, and the waves ran along its side, making curved
lines on the masonry like curved lines of a rope shaken from one end.
The wet floor of the jetty shone like a mirror. Edwin approached the
crowd, and, peeping over black shoulders, could see down into the hollow
of the corner between the jetty and the sea-wall, where boys on the
steps dared the spent waves, amid jeering laughter. The crowd had the
air of being a family intimately united. Farther on was another similar
crowd, near an irregular high fountain of spray that glittered in the
dark. On the beach below, at vague distances were curious rows of
apparently tiny people silhouetted like the edge of a black saw against
an excessive whiteness. This whiteness was the sheet of foam that the
sea made. It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards.
Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw. The tide
ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw
noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was
re-created. This play went on endlessly, hypnotising the spectators
who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe,
at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness.
Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence,
the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure,
strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.
Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned
against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of
the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the
bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his
mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to
Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade. "Why am I
doing this?" he asked himself again and again. "Why don't I go home? I
must be mad to be doing this." Still his legs carried him on, past
lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost
deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels
were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier,
which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and
opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps:
Regency Square. He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of
it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street.
He went hot and cold.
------------------------------------------------------------------------