“Nothing of that sort,” replied Brinkman. “His people took their name from the place, not the other way round. He started here with a big shop, which he turned over to some relations of his when he made good at Pullford. He quarrelled with them afterward, but he always had a sentimental feeling for the place. It’s astonishing what a number of group names there are still left in England. There is no clan system to explain it. Yet I suppose every tenth family in this place is called ‘Pillock.’ ”
“It suggests the accident of birth,” admitted the old gentleman, “rather than choice. And poor Mottram’s family, you say, came from the district?”
“They had been here, I believe, for generations. But this habit of naming the man from the place is curiously English. Most nations have the patronymic instinct; the Welsh, for example, or the Russians. But with us, apparently, if a stranger moved into a new district, he became John of Chilthorpe, and his descendants were Chilthorpes for ever.”
“A strange taste,” pursued the old gentleman, harping on the unwelcome subject, “to want to come and lay your bones among your ancestors. It causes so much fuss and even scandal. For myself, if I ever decided to put a term to my own existence, I should go to some abominable place—Margate, for example—and try to give it a bad name by being washed up just underneath the pier.”
“You would fail, sir,” objected Brinkman; “I mean, as far as giving it a bad name was concerned. You do not give things a good name or a bad name nowadays; you only give them an advertisement. I honestly believe that if a firm advertised its own cigarettes as beastly it would draw money from an inquisitive public.”
“Mrs. Davis has had an inquisitive public to-day. I assure you, when I went out this morning I was followed for a considerable distance by a crowd of small boys who probably thought that I intended to drag the river. By the way, if they do drag the river, it will be interesting to find out whether there were, after all, any fish in it. You will let me be present, sir?” turning to Leyland, who was plainly annoyed by the appeal. Angela had to strike in and ask who was the character in Happy Thoughts who was always asking his friends to come down and drag the pond. So the uneasy conversation zigzagged on, Mr. Pulteney always returning to the subject which occupied their thoughts, the rest heading him off. Bredon was deliberately silent. He meant to have an interview with Brinkman afterward, and he was determined that Brinkman should have no chance of sizing him up beforehand.
The opportunity was found without difficulty after supper; Brinkman succumbed at once to the offer of a cigar and a walk in the clear air of the summer evening. Bredon had suggested sitting on the bridge, but it was found that at that hour of the evening all the seating accommodation was already booked. Brinkman then proposed a visit to the Long Pool, but Bredon excused himself on the ground of distance. They climbed a little way up the hill road, and found one of those benches, seldom occupied, which seem to issue their invitation to travellers who are short of breath. Here they could rest in solitude, watching cloud after cloud as it turned to purple in the dying sunlight and the shadows gathering darker over the hill crests.
“I’m from the Indescribable, you know. Expect Mrs. Davis has told you. I’d better show you my cardcase so that you can see it’s correct. They send me to fool round, you know, when this sort of thing happens. Have to be careful, I suppose.” (“This Brinkman,” he had said to Angela, “must take me for a bit of a chump; if possible, worse than I am.”)
“I don’t quite see”—— began Brinkman.
“Oh, the old thing, suicide, you know. Mark you, they don’t absolutely bar it. I’ve known ’em pay up when a fellow was obviously potty. But their rules are against it. What I say is, If a man has the pluck to do himself in he ought to get away with the stakes, Well, all this must be a great nuisance to you, Mr. Brickman”——