All stared; the inspector stared; but nothing happened. Mr. Prohack had a sense of reprieve, and also of having been baptised or inducted into a secret society. He listened heartily to forty conversations about physical diversions and luxuries and about the malignant and fatuous wrong-headedness of men who went on strike, and about the approaching catastrophic end of all things.
Meanwhile, at any rate in the coach, the fabric of society seemed to be holding together fairly well. Before the train was half-way to Frinton Mr. Prohack judged—and rightly—that he was already there. The fact was that he had been there ever since entering the saloon. After two hours the train, greatly diminished in length, came to rest in the midst of a dark flatness, and the entire population of the coach vanished out of it in the twinkling of an eye, and Mr. Prohack saw the name 'Frinton' on a flickering oil-lamp, and realised that he was at the gates of the most fashionable resort in England, a spot where even the ozone was exclusive. The station staff marvelled at him because he didn't know where the Majestic Hotel was and because he asked without notice for a taxi, fly, omnibus or anything on wheels. All the other passengers had disappeared. The exclusive ozone was heavy with exciting romance for Mr. Prohack as the station staff considered his unique and incomprehensible case. Then a tiny omnibus materialised out of the night.
"Is this the Majestic bus?" Mr. Prohack enquired of the driver.
"Well, it is if you like, sir," the driver answered.
Mr. Prohack did like....
The Majestic was large and prim, resembling a Swiss hotel in its furniture, the language and composition of the menu, the dialect of the waiters; but it was about fifteen degrees colder than the highest hotel in Switzerland. The dining-room was shaded with rose-shaded lamps and it susurrated with the polite whisperings of elegant couples and trios, and the entremet was cabinet pudding: a fine display considering the depth of winter and of the off-season.
Mr. Prohack went off after dinner for a sharp walk in the east wind. Solitude! Blackness! Night! East wind in the bushes of gardens that shielded the façades of large houses! Not a soul! Not a policeman! He descended precariously to the vast, smooth beach. The sound of the sea! Romance! Mr. Prohack seemed to walk for miles, like Ozymandias, on the lone and level sands. Then he fancied he descried a moving object. He was not mistaken. It approached him. It became a man and a woman. It became a man and a young woman arm-in-arm and soul-in-soul. And there was nothing but the locked couple, and the sound of the invisible, immeasurable sea, and the east wind, and Mr. Prohack. Romance thrilled through Mr. Prohack's spine.
"So I said to him," the man was saying to the young woman as the pair passed Mr. Prohack, "I said to him 'I could do with a pint o' that,' I said."
III
The next morning Mr. Prohack rose with alacrity from a hard bed, and was greeted in the hall by the manager of the hotel, an enormous, middle-aged, sun-burnt, jolly person in flannels and an incandescent blazer, who asked him about his interests in golf and hard-court tennis. Mr. Prohack, steeped as he felt himself to be in strange romance, was prepared to be interested in these games, but the self-protective instinct warned him that since these games could not be played alone they would, if he indulged in them, bring him into contact with people who might prove tedious. He therefore changed the conversation and asked whether he could have strawberry jam to his breakfast. The manager's face instantly changed, hardening to severity. Was Mr. Prohack eccentric? Did he desire to disturb the serene habits of the hotel? The manager promised to see. He did see, and announced that he was 'afraid' that Mr. Prohack could not have strawberry jam to his breakfast. And Mr. Prohack said to himself: "What would my son Charles have done?" During a solitary breakfast (with blackberry jam) in the huge dining-room, Mr. Prohack decided that Charles would have approached the manager differently.