Mad Hatter's Holiday Read Online Free PDF Page A

it was not the same without The Morning Post.
    The current editions of Brighton’s seventeen daily and weekly papers, liberally arranged along the eighty-foot length of the hall, were not much in demand. The single exception was The Fashionable Visitors’ List. For every one studying that journal, three or four waited to replace him. Suitably, it was mounted under glass on an elongated lectern. At another table, the latest telegrams were dissected by a small colony of holiday-makers from the London Stock Exchange.
    Moscrop stood in uncertainty, trying to make the same decision that provoked such discussion outside. Should he turn left and enter the restaurant or go forward into the main aquarium? He was already satisfied that the boy was not in the reading-room. It was fair to presume that if he was in the building at all he had come there to meet someone. Perhaps he had already met them outside and gone into the restaurant. If he had, he should be there for a considerable while; long enough to make it safe to search the corridors housing the tanks. He stepped forward decisively.
    He was unprepared for the next experience. After the babble outside, the clublike concentration in the reading-room had presented a contrast, but it was at least recognisable as another aspect of modern life. The aquarium was not. It was other-worldly. Dimly-lit aisles extended before him like cloisters in a Fra Angelico fresco. Pillars of deeply coloured serpentine marble, Bath stone and red Edinburgh granite supported a groined roof stretching ahead for more than two hundred feet. It was formed of variegated bricks, crossed by finely moulded Gothic vaulting. The impression on Moscrop was profound; he would not have blinked an eye if an organ had started to play and a clerical procession walked past. He was ready to accept that a patch of light on the pavement to his left was filtered through a stained-glass window. It seemed sacreligious to discover that it came from a gas-lit tank of lobsters.
    He paced the corridor uneasily, peering ahead for a glimpse of the boy, but feeling obliged to simulate some interest in the tanks, rather as one casts an eye over tombstones on a cathedral tour. A skate came close to the glass of one and hovered there, a grotesque parody of a human face, with wicked twinkling eyes and mocking mouth. Mackerel and herrings played among the rising bubbles. Bass dived repeatedly into the fine grit at the bottom of their tank, rolling themselves in it with evident relish. In the main tank, over a hundred feet long, porpoises darted easily from end to end. A line of visitors watched in hushed amazement at such quicksilver velocity contained within a foot of their faces.
    Halfway along the corridor there was still no glimpse of red in the line of shuffling visitors. He kept towards the centre, near the small tanks of tropical fish mounted on pedestals. He smiled wryly at one labelled Shanghai Telescope Fish. Newtonian or Cassegrainian? Whichever they were, they would find it a challenge to produce any image at all in this dim underworld. No telescope he knew could retain sufficient light to be of any use here.
    To his right he noticed a passage leading to a separate exhibit. The New Alligator and Crocodile Cavern is now completed and Open to the Public announced a board beside it. He hesitated. Might such a curiosity interest a boy of fifteen? He supposed it would. As a meeting-place, however, it was a singularly unlikely choice. She of the fluttering white hat was impossible to imagine making a rendezvous in a reptile-house.
    He reviewed the line of visitors filing past the tanks. Several straw boaters were prominent. Not a single red blazer. There was nothing for it but to try the Crocodile Cavern.
    The interior was darker than the main aquarium. Hissing gas-jets situated at floor-level threw a yellowish light over indeterminate areas of mud and vegetation. He waited at the entrance, accustoming his eyes to the conditions.