II
"Heaven knows what we are going to do with ourselves here," he remarked to Helen during lunch.
"You've got to rest," replied Helen.
He went on to a melancholy mastication of bread. "So far as I can see, we're the only visitors in the entire hotel."
"Well, Kenneth, March is hardly the season, is it?"
"Then why did we come here? I'd much rather have gone to town, where there's always something happening. But a seaside-place in winter!—is there anything in the world more depressing?"
"There's nobody in the world more depressing than you are yourself," she answered tartly. "It isn't my fault we've come here in March. It isn't my fault we've come here at all. And what good would London have done for you? It's rest you want, and you'll get it here."
"Heavens, yes—I'll get it all right."
After a silence he smiled and said: "I'm sorry, Helen, for being such a wet blanket. And you're quite right, it isn't your fault—not any of it. What can we do this afternoon?"
"We can have a walk along the cliffs," she answered.
He nodded and took up a week-old copy of the Seacliffe Gazette. "That's what we'll do," he said, beginning to read.
So that afternoon they had a walk along the cliffs.
In fact there was really nothing at all to do in Seacliffe during the winter season except to take a walk along the cliffs. Everything wore an air of depression—the dingy rain-sodden refreshment kiosks, the shuttered bandstand, the rusting tram rails on the promenade, along which no trams had run since the preceding October, the melancholy pier pavilion, forlornly decorated with the tattered advertisements of last season's festivities. Nothing remained of the town's social amenities but the cindered walk along the cliff edges, and this, except for patches of mud and an absence of strollers, was much the same as usual. Speed and Helen walked vigorously, as people do on the first day of their holidays—grimly determined to extract every atom of nourishment out of the much-advertised air. They climbed the slope of the Beach hill, past the gaunt five-storied basemented boarding-houses, past the yachting club-house, past the marine gardens, past the rows of glass shelters, and then on to the winding cinder-path that rose steeply to the edge of the cliffs. Meanwhile the mist turned to rain and the sea and the sky merged together into one vast grey blur without a horizon.
Then they went back to the Beach Hotel for tea.
Then they read the magazines until dinner-time, and after dinner, more magazines until bedtime.
The next day came the same routine again; walk along the cliffs in the morning; walk along the cliffs in the afternoon; tea; magazines; dinner; magazines; bed. Speed discovered in the hotel a bookcase entirely filled with cheap novels that had been left behind by previous visitors. He read some of them until their small print gave him a headache. Helen revelled in them. In the mornings, by way of a variant from the cliff walk, they took to sitting on the windless side of the municipal shelters, absorbed in the novels. It was melancholy, and yet Speed felt with some satisfaction that he was undoubtedly resting, and that, on the whole, he was enduring it better than he had expected.