Drub-drub—drub-drub——
There passed through the Season Ticket turnstile two young men. Both wore dark suits and conventional collars and ties (as if they, at any rate, had no need to don their coloured jackets and flannel trousers while they could), and the attendant at the turnstile had touched his cap as they had passed. One of them, the taller of the two, wore his straw hat halo-wise at the back of his head, filled his pipe as he walked, and looked cheerfully and unobservingly about him; the other's straw was well down, and the eyes beneath its brim sought somebody or something, and would apparently be satisfied with nothing less. The first was Percy Briggs, and everybody in Llanyglo knew Percy Briggs—Percy Briggs, who strolled casually into Hotel Cosies towards midday, nodded to the more favoured ones, said to the barmaid "So and So been in yet?" and, getting a bright "No, Mr. Briggs, not yet" for an answer, lounged out again without having had a drink—a sufficient gage of privilege and familiarity with the place. The other was John Willie Garden, who knew Llanyglo, knew which faces had been there last year and the year before, and was now looking for a face he had seen yesterday evening for one moment only and had then lost again.
The Pier was an old, old story to him now. Between seasons, on winter nights, the drub-drub of a few months before seemed sometimes still faintly to echo in his ears—this when the grey skies came, and in the hotels a few rooms only were kept open for unprofitable commercial travellers, and the Promenade was empty, and the Pleasure Packet Service laid up, and a walk to the end of the Pier and back seemed a long way to feet that had covered the distance twenty times on a summer's evening, and the colourless sea seemed to give to the red and white blink of the Trwyn Light a sudden and nearer significance. He knew every hour of Llanyglo's day—the hours of departure of the pleasure-boats to Rhyl and Llandudno and round Anglesey, the bathing-hours in the morning, the high-school parade at midday, the second bathing relay in the afternoon, the tea-hour, the walk of parents and children to see the boats come in again in the early evening, and then, as the evening wore on, the successive appearances and droppings out of this kind or that, the emptying of the Pavilions, the inflow of the shop-girls and waitresses, the rush for the public-houses half an hour before the Pier lights went out, the thinning numbers who beat the Promenade, the parties of the Alsatians who sat up in one another's hotels long after every public drinking-place had been closed. He had nothing further to learn about it all, and it bored him. Only his search for that girl had brought him on the Pier to-night.
He had been almost certain he knew her, but where he had seen her face before he could not for the life of him remember. Perhaps he did not know her after all; indeed, when he came to think of it, no memory of a voice seemed to go with the face, so that the probability was that if he had seen her before he had never spoken to her. She had been standing, in that blue twilight, clear of the throng, under the single crimson pier-head light, looking out over the water that seemed still to reflect a light that had faded from the sky, and for a moment John Willie had wondered what she was looking at. The next moment he had seen—and so, confound it, had twenty others. A yellow spot, like a riding-light, had risen out of the sea; almost as quickly as the second-hand of a watch moves, it had become a tip; and then the lookers-in at the glass sides of the Pavilion had run to see the rising of the bloated, refraction-magnified, burning yellow horn. In that little running of people he had lost her. Twice, thrice he had walked the whole length of the Pier, but without seeing her again. All of her that he could now remember was the carriage of her head and her plain black dress, and he knew that dress, in this extraordinary raising of the standard of dressing which implies the possession by almost everybody of two dresses at least, was an uncertain guide.
Another rattle of hand-clapping broke out as Percy Briggs and John Willie passed the turnstiles. "Any good looking in there?" Percy asked, nodding towards the Concert Hall, but John Willie made no reply. He was as cross as a bear with a sore head. Twice already he had rounded on Percy, who had proposed drinks at this place or that, and had snapped "You go if you want—I'm not keeping you;" but Percy had replied good-naturedly, "Oh, all right, keep your hair on."
The sounds of two more pairs of heels were added to the drub-drubbing on the planks of the Pier.
It seemed idle to seek, but John Willie stood looking in at the glass sides of the Pavilion at the pier-head, searching the bright and crowded interior. His mind was as obstinately set as that of a mule. It seemed to him idiotic that all those rows and rows of people should clap the inanities of the young man in knee-breeched evening-dress who strutted and made painted eyes over the top of a flattened opera-hat, or encore Miss Sal Volatile, all spidery black silk stockings below and cocksfeather boa and enormous black halfmoon hat above. John Willie turned away to the low-burning crimson pier-light. He stood there for some moments, and then began to stride back the length of the Pier again.
"Chucking it?" said Percy, half sympathetic, half "getting at" John Willie.
"Come on to the Kursaal," John Willie grunted.
The Kursaal lay behind the two frontages of Gardd and Pontnewydd Streets, and it could be reached from either thoroughfare. From Gardd Street, up another short street, the great lighted semicircle of what was then its Main Entrance could be seen; and if the minor entrance from Pontnewydd Street was at that time less resplendent, that was because the Kerrs' Hafod stood in the way of opening it up. With its grounds and theatre and vast dancing-hall, the Kursaal covered getting on for an eighth of a square mile; but a third or more of that was still in progress of being laid out and planted—once more by Philip Lacey.