Random Harvest

by James Hilton

  "Why, of course—only I thought maybe after the dentist you'd feel—"

  "My dear boy, don't ever try to imagine what my feelings are."

  But he smiled in saying it, and I gathered he had forgiven not so much me as himself for having taken part in our train conversation. A few friends adjourned to my rooms near by, where we sat around and continued discussions informally. Again he charmed us by his talk, but even more by his easy manners and willingness to laugh and listen; long after most of the good-nights he still lingered chatting, listening, and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I didn't know then that he slept badly and liked to stay up late, that he enjoyed young company and jokes and midnight argument, that he had no snobbisms, and that public speaking left him either very dull and listless or very excitable and talkative, according to the audience. Towards three in the morning, when we found ourselves sole survivors, I suggested more coffee, and at that he sank into an armchair with a sigh of content and put his feet against the mantelpiece as if the place belonged to him—which, in a sense, it did, as to any Swithin's man since the reign of Elizabeth the Foundress. "I've been in these rooms before—often. Fellow with the disarming name of Pal had them in my time—'native of Asia or Africa not of European parentage,' as the University regulations so tactfully specify. High-caste Hindoo. Mathematician—genius in his own line—wonder what he's doing now?—probably distilling salt out of sea-water or lying down in front of trains or some other blind-alley behaviour. Used to say he felt algebra emotionally— told me once he couldn't read through the Binomial Theorem without tears coming into his eyes—the whole concept, he said, was so shatteringly beautiful. . . . Wish I could have got into his world, somehow or other. And there are other worlds, too—wish sometimes I could get into any of them—out of my own."

  "What's so wrong about your own?"

  He laughed defensively. "Now there you've got me. . . . Maybe, as you hinted yesterday, just a matter of overwork. But it's true enough that talking to all you young fellows tonight made me feel terribly ancient and envious."

  "Not ENVIOUS, surely? It's we who are envious of you—because you've made a success of life. We're a pretty disillusioned crowd when we stop laughing—we know there won't be jobs for more than a minority of us unless a war comes to give all of us the kind of job we don't want."

  He mused over his coffee for a moment and then continued: "Yes, that's true—and that's probably why I feel how different everything is here instead of how much the same—because my Cambridge days WERE different. The war was just over then, and our side had won, and we all of us thought that winning a great war ought to mean something, either towards making our lives a sort of well-deserved happy-ever-after—a long golden afternoon of declining effort and increasing reward—or else to give us chances to rebuild the world this way or that. It all depended whether one were tired or eager after the strain. Most of us were both—tired of the war and everything connected with it, eager to push ahead into something new. We soon stopped hating the Germans, and just as soon we began to laugh at the idea of anyone caring enough about the horrid past to ask us that famous question on the recruiting posters—'What did you do in the Great War?' But even the most cynical of us couldn't see ahead to a time when the only logical answer to that question would be another one—'WHICH Great War?'

  "There was a room over a fish shop in Petty Cury where some of us met once a week to talk our heads off—we called ourselves the Heretics, but I can't remember anything said at those meetings half so well as I can remember the smell of fish coming up from the shop below. And J. M. Keynes was lecturing in the Art School, politely suggesting that Germany mightn't be able to pay off so many millions in reparations, or was it billions?—in those days one just thought of a number and stuck as many naughts as one fancied after it. And there were Holland Rose on Napoleon and Pigou on Diminishing Returns, and Bury still explaining the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one evening Pal and I—sounds sentimental, doesn't it, Pal and I?—lined up in a queue that stretched half-way round Trinity Great Court to hear a lecture by a fellow named Eddington about some new German fellow named Einstein who had a theory about light bending in the middle—that brought the house down, of course—roars of laughter—just as you heard tonight only more so—good clean undergraduate fun at its best. And behind us on the wall the portrait of Catholic Mary scowled down on this modern audience that scoffed at science no less than at religion. Heretics indeed—and laughing heretics! But my pal Pal didn't laugh—he was transfixed with a sort of ecstasy about the whole thing.

  "I did a good deal of reading on the river, and also at the Orchard at Grantchester—you remember Rupert Brooke's poem? Brooke would be fifty today, if he'd lived—think of that. . . . Still stands the clock at ten to three, but Rupert Brooke is late for tea— confined to his bed with rheumatism or something—that's what poets get for not dying young. The woman at the Orchard who served the teas remembered Brooke—she was a grand old chatterbox and once I got to know her she'd talk endlessly about undergraduates and professors past and present—many a yarn, I daresay, that I've forgotten since and that nobody else remembered even then. . . . Trivial talk—just as trivial as the way I'm talking to you now. Nineteen-twenty, that was—Cambridge full of demobilized old-young men still wearing dyed officers' overcoats—British warms sent up to Perth and returned chocolate-brown—full of men still apt to go suddenly berserk in the middle of a rag and turn it into a riot, or start whimpering during a thunderstorm—after-effects of shell- shock, you know. Plenty of us had had that—including myself."

  "As a result of the head injury you mentioned yesterday?"

  "I suppose so."

  "You had a pretty bad time?"

  "No, I was one of the lucky ones—comparatively, that is. But when you're blown up, even if you're not physically smashed to bits . . ." He broke off awkwardly. "I'm sorry. It isn't Armistice Day any more. These confessions are out of place."

  "Not at all. I'm interested. It's so hard for my generation to imagine what it was like."

  "Don't worry—you'll learn soon enough."

  "How long was it before you were rescued?"

  "Haven't the faintest idea. I suppose I was unconscious."

  "But you must have recovered consciousness later?"

  "Presumably. I don't remember when or where or any of the details. But I've some reason to believe I was taken prisoner."

  "Reason to believe? That's a guarded way of putting it."

  "I know—but it happens to be just about all I can say. You see, I literally don't remember. From that moment of being knocked out my memory's a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool."

  "YEARS later?"

  "Getting on for three years, but of course I didn't know that at first. And it was a wet day, as luck would have it." He smiled. "You don't find my story very plausible?"

  "I might if you'd tell me the whole of it—without gaps."

  "But there ARE gaps—that's just the trouble."

  "What were you doing in Liverpool?"

  "Once again, I haven't the faintest idea. I didn't even know it was Liverpool at first. The main thing was to know WHO I was— where and when were easy enough to find out later."

  "Do you mean you'd been going by some other name until then?"

  "Maybe. I suppose so. That's another of the things I don't know. It's as if . . . well, I've sometimes worked it out this way—there were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other."

  "Well, what did you do when you realized who you were?"

  "What anybody else would do. I went home. I felt in my pockets and found I had a small sum in cash, so I bought a new outfit of clothes, took a bath at a hotel, and then went to the railway station. It was as simple as that, because along with knowing my own name it had come to me without apparent effort that I lived at Stourton, that my father owned the Rainier Steelworks and all the other
concerns, that we had a butler named Sheldon, and any other details I cared to recall. In fact I knew all about myself in a perfectly normal way up to the moment of that shell-burst near Arras in 1917."

  "Your father must have got a very pleasant shock."

  "He was too ill to be allowed it, but the family got one all right. Of course, since I'd been reported missing in the casualty lists, they'd long since given me up for dead."

  "It's a very remarkable story."

  "Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away."

  I thought for a moment; then I said: "But the Army authorities must have had some record of your coming back to England?"

  "None—not under the name of Rainier."

  "But wasn't there a disc or something you had to wear all the time on active service?"

  "There was, but if you'd ever experienced levitation by high explosive you wouldn't put much faith in a bit of metal tied round your neck. It's quite possible there was nothing the Germans could identify me by when they took me prisoner."

  "What makes you think you were ever in Germany at all?"

  "Surely if I'd been dragged in by my own men they'd have known who I was?"

  "H'm, yes, I suppose so."

  He went on, after a pause: "I don't blame you at all if you don't believe a word of all this. And it's just as well you're the first person I've confided in for years—just as well for my reputation as a sober citizen." He laughed with self-protective cynicism. "It's been a conspiracy of events to make me talk like this— Armistice Day—our meeting on the train—and then something the dentist said tonight when I came out of his nitrous oxide."

  "The dentist? What's he got to do with it?"

  "He was making polite conversation while I spat blood. One of the things he said was, 'So you were a prisoner in Germany?' I asked him what gave him that idea, and he answered, 'Because I notice you have a tooth filled with a substitute metal German dentists were having to use during the latter part of the war'—apparently he'd come across other instances of it."

  We were silent for a moment. I could hear the first stir of early morning traffic beginning along King's Parade. Rainier heard it too, and as at a signal rose to go. "A strange business, the war. The English told the Germans exactly where I was, so that the Germans could kill me . . . then the Germans did half kill me, patched me up, and saw that my teeth were properly cared for . . . after which the English gave me a medal for having displayed what they called 'conspicuous gallantry in the field.'" He fingered it on his lapel, adding: "I wear it at shows like this, along with the Most Noble Order of Something-or-Other which the Greeks gave me for arranging a loan on their currant crop in 1928." He began putting on his overcoat, heedless of my assurance that there was no hurry and that I often sat up till dawn myself. "Please don't bother to see me out—I'll take a bath at my hotel and be in time for the first train."

  On his way across the room he paused at my shelves of books and asked what tripos I was taking.

  "Economics. I took the first part of the History last year."

  "Really? I did the same when I was here. But where does the psycho-analysis come in?"

  "Oh, that's only a side-line."

  "I see. Made any plans for when you go down?"

  "I'd like to be a journalist."

  He nodded, shaking hands at the door. "Well, I've got a few contacts in Fleet Street. Write to me when you're ready for a job— I might be able to do something for you."

  * * * * *

  Early the following year I took a Ph.D. and began looking around for the post which, it seemed to me then, ought to drop snugly into the lap of any bright young man who had written a two-hundred-page thesis on "The Influence of Voltaire on the English Laissez-Faire Economists." Cambridge had deemed this worthy of a doctorate; nobody in Fleet Street, however, held it worth a regular job. I had a very small private income and could therefore afford to cadge snippets of highbrow reviewing from some of the more illustrious and penurious weeklies, reckoning myself well-paid if the books themselves were expensive and could be sold for more cash to Mr. Reeves of the Strand; but the newspaper world at that time was full of journalists out of work through amalgamations, and the chance of getting on the staffs of any of the big dailies was not encouraging. Of course I remembered Rainier's offer, but apart from my reluctance to bother him, he was abroad—in South America on some financial business. But by the time he returned I had been disappointed often enough to feel I should take him at his word. He replied instantly to my note, asking me to lunch the next day.

  Thus I made my first trip to Kenmore. "Near the World's End pub," Rainier used to say, and it was the fashion among certain guests to pretend it was at some actual world's end if not beyond it—the world in this super-sophisticated sense being that part of London within normal taxi range. I went by bus, which puts you down at the corner of the road with only a hundred yards or so to walk. I had no idea how notable, not to say notorious, those Kenmore lunches were; indeed, since the invitation had come so promptly, I had beguiled myself with visions of an intimate foursome composed of host and hostess with perhaps a press magnate summoned especially to meet me. I did not know then that Mrs. Rainier gave lunches for ten or twelve people two or three times a week, enticing every temporary or permanent celebrity to meet other temporary or permanent celebrities at her house, and that these affairs were as frequently joked about as they were infrequently declined. She functioned, in fact, as a kind of liaison officer between Society and Bohemia, with a Maecenas glance at moneyless but personable young men; and though there is no kind of social service I would less willingly undertake myself, there are few that I respect more when competently performed by someone else.

  Searching my memory for impressions of that first arrival, I find I cannot put Mrs. Rainier into the picture at all. She was there, she must have been; but she was so busy making introductions that she could not have given me more than a few words, and those completely unimportant. I came a little late and found myself ushered into a drawing-room full of initiates, all talking with great gusto, and all—so it seemed to me (quite baselessly, of course)—resentful of intrusion by a stranger who had neither written a banned novel nor flown somewhere and back in an incredibly short time. I say this because one of the guests HAD written such a novel, and another HAD made such a flight, and it was my fate to be seated between them while they talked either to their outside neighbours or across me to each other. There was an empty place at the head of the table, and presently I gathered from general conversation that Rainier often arrived late and sometimes not at all, so that he was never on any account waited for. I had already written off the whole affair as a rather profitless bore when the guests rose, murmured hasty good-byes, and dashed out to waiting cars and taxis. (Mrs. Rainier's lunches were always like that—one-fifteen sharp to two-fifteen sharp and not too much to drink, so that you did not kill your afternoon.) Just as I was following the crowd, a touch on my arm accompanied the whisper: "Stay a moment if you aren't in a hurry."

  Mrs. Rainier led me a few paces back along the hall after the others had gone. "I didn't quite catch your name—"

  "Harrison."

  "Oh yes. . . . You're a friend of Charles's—it's too bad he couldn't get here—he's so busy nowadays."

  I murmured something vague, polite, and intended to be reassuring.

  "It's a pity people who can fly half-way round the world haven't any manners," she went on, and I answered: "Well, I suppose there are quite a number of people who have manners and couldn't fly half- way round the world."

  "But having manners is so much more important," she countered. "Tell me . . . what . . . er . . . I mean, are you a . . . let me see . . . HARRISON . . ."

  I smiled—suddenly and rather incomprehensibly at ease with her. "You're trying to recall a Harrison who's written something, married somebody, or been somewhere," I said. "But it's a waste of time—I'm not THAT Harrison, even if he exists. I'm just—if I call myself anything
—a journalist."

  "Oh . . . then you must come again when we have really LITERARY parties," she replied, with an eagerness I thought charming though probably insincere. I promised I would, with equal eagerness, and every intention of avoiding her really LITERARY parties like the plague. Then I shook hands, left the house, and on the bus back to Fleet Street suddenly realized that it had been a very good lunch from one point of view. I had never tasted better eggs Mornay.

  The next afternoon Rainier telephoned, profuse in apologies for his absence from the lunch, and though the matter could hardly have been important to him, I thought I detected a note of sincerity. "I gather you didn't have a very good time," he said, and before I could reply went on: "I'm not keen on the mob, either, but Helen's a born hostess—almost as good as an American—she can take in twenty new names all in a row and never make a mistake."

  "She didn't take in mine. In fact it was pretty clear she didn't know me from Adam."

  "My fault, I expect. Must have forgotten to tell her."