“It beats me how the stream does it. Here’s a little trickle of water that can’t shift a pebble weighing half a pound. Give it a few thousand years, and it eats its way through the solid rock, and digs a course for itself a matter of fifteen or twenty feet deep. And all that process is a mere moment of time, compared with the millions of years that lie behind us. If you want to reckon the age of the earth’s crust, they say, you must do it in thousands of millions of years. Queer, isn’t it?”
“Damned rum.”
“You almost understate the position. Don’t you feel sometimes as if the whole of human life on this planet were a mere episode, and all our boasted human achievement were a speck on the ocean of infinity?”
“Sometimes. But one can always take a pill, can’t one?”
“Why, yes, if it comes to that. . . . An amusing creature, Pulteney.”
“Bit highbrow, isn’t he? He always makes me feel rather as if I were back at school again. My wife likes him, though.”
“He has the schoolmaster’s manner. It develops the conversational style, talking to a lot of people who have no chance of answering back. You get it with parsons too, sometimes. I really believe it would be almost a disappointment to him if he caught a fish, so fond is he of satirizing his own performance. . . . You haven’t been in these parts before, have you?”
“Never. It’s a pity, really, to make their acquaintance in such a tragic way. Gives you a kind of depressing feeling about a place when your first introduction to it is over a death-bed.”
“I am sure it must. . . . It’s a pity the country out toward Pullford has been so much spoilt by factories. It used to be some of the finest country in England. And there’s nothing like English country, is there? Have you travelled much, apart from the war, of course?”
“Now, what the devil does this man think he’s doing?” Bredon asked himself. Could it be that Brinkman, after making up his mind to unbosom himself, was feeling embarrassed about making a start, was taking refuge in every other conceivable topic so as to put off the dreaded moment of confession? That seemed the only possible construction to put on his conversational vagaries. But how to give him a lead? “Very little, as a matter of fact. I suppose you went about a good deal with Mottram? I should think a fellow as rich as he was gets a grand chance of seeing the world. Funny his wanting to spend his holiday in a poky little place like this.”