The Paper Men by William Golding

my left at eye level and pine roots in a bank on my right. Rick, I now saw, was leaning negligently against a railing on the left-hand side of the path.
    “Aw, Wilf—it’s solid as the rock.”
    Nevertheless he heaved himself upright, adjusted his pace to mine. There was the sound of water rushing down the mountain somewhere ahead. It was strangely comforting, heaven knows why. I stared up into the fog and could make out now and then a silver penny racing through intense whiteness and inanity towards the zenith. I looked down and round me. The three tops had withdrawn, suggesting some increasing gap of air below us on the left.
    “Are you sure this path is OK, Rick? You’ve been along it? A solid rail all the way? No nasty surprises?’
    “No, sir.”
    We walked on together. The rushing sound was nearer and presently water came into view. It was a small mountain stream that dropped out of the fog on the right, splashed across the path and disappeared into the fog below us. Rick stopped before the stream. He raised a finger, hushing me. I stopped and hushed. He had more black hairs in his right nostril than the left. He was right-nostrilled.
    There was nothing to hear but the stream and, faintly somewhere, cowbells. I sat by the stream on a convenient projection of rock. I looked up at him, raising my eyebrows. For answer he pointed to the stream. I listened again, bent down and pretended to smell it, put a finger in but took it out again quickly, fearing frost bite.
    “Can’t you hear, Wilf?”
    “Course I can.”
    “I mean—isn’t there something real queer about the sound?”
    “No.”
    “Listen again.”
    It was true. The stream, a single skein of falling water briefly interrupted by the path, had two voices, not one. There was the cheerful babble, a kind of frivolity as if the thing, the Form, enjoyed its bounding passage downward, through space. Then running under that was a deep, meditative hum as if despite the frivolity and surface prattle the thing sounded from some deep secret of the mountain itself.
    “It’s not just single!”
    “Yeah. ‘Two voices are there, one is of the deep—’”
    I looked at him with surprise that turned to an unwilling degree of respect. There had been last night—and now this.
    “I’ve never listened to water before—not really listened.”
    “I can’t believe that, Wilf.”
    Also, my mind noted and put away in some drawer to be taken out later that there was a lengthy piece of prose to be written on listening to natural sound—listening without comment or presupposition.
    “How come, Rick, as you might say? I mean why you?”
    “I’m not making the connection, Wilf.”
    “Listening to a stream!”
    “I know how I must seem to you, sir. Just another sincere but limited academic.”
    “Oh my! Oh my giddy aunt! Golly! Dash it!”
    “I mean it, Wilf.”
    “Straightforward. Sincere. A man incapable of—”
    But Rick had gone on as if something I had not known in him had been touched.
    “I do listen. I always have done. Birds, wind, water—the different sounds of water. Sometimes I think in the sea you can hear the salt. The difference, I mean.”
    “The great outdoors.”
    “Surely. Then sometimes, you know, you lie awake and listen to no noise, though that’s rare nowadays—but sometimes you can listen to no noise—positive no noise and go out and out and out, searching—”
    “Nature mysticism.”
    “No, sir. It’s just how living is. Then there’s music. Oh my God. But I hadn’t the talent.”
    “Had to settle for the groves of academe.”
    “Yeah. No—I mean, sincerely no!”
    “Let’s get on.”
    Rick came towards me, his cleft chin out where it belonged now, as if the sound of water was a cure for diffidence. I had one of those moments, not so much of thought as rapid reflection, a split second in which possibilities, alternatives were considered and dismissed. I dismissed. Was a cleft chin a sign of weakness? No. Was it the sign of a