Random Harvest

by James Hilton

Presently we turned off the main road and curved for a mile between high hedges; then suddenly, in a distant fold of the downs, a vision in cream-colored stone broke through heavy parkland trees. Woburn, who had not seen it before, joined me in a little gasp of admiration. “You were intended to do that,” said Rainier. “In fact the architect and roadbuilder conspired about it two hundred years ago. My brother Julian, who fancied himself as a phrase maker, once called it ‘a stucco prima donna making a stage entrance.’ Now, you see, it goes out of sight.” Intervening upland obscured the house for another mile or so until, at a new turn of the road, it reappeared so much more intimately that one could only give it a nod of respectful recognition.

Charles’s return had somehow disturbed their equilibrium, for if there is one thing more mentally upsetting to a family than death, it must be (on account of its rarity) resurrection.

when he met her some weeks later he chaffed her gently about it, saying that workmen on banners always had enormous fists, whether for fraternization or for assault and battery he could never be quite certain—maybe both. He smiled as he said it, but she suddenly flew into a rage, accusing him of being a coward who took refuge in cynicism from the serious issues of the world.

There isn’t any room for humor in the world as it is today. And it’s that English sense of humor, which everybody boasts about, that really prevents things from being done.” “You’re probably right. But think of all the things that are better left undone.” “The day will come when men may be killed for laughing.” “And that will also be the day when men laugh at killing.”

Nineteen twenty-seven brought riots in Vienna and executions in Russia; while for once Englishmen found themselves suddenly and astonishingly against something—they were against the Revised Prayer Book, proposed by the Church Assembly and sent to the House of Commons to be voted on, according to the curious English custom by which a political majority decides the dogmatic beliefs of a religious minority. And during the next year, 1928, the House of Commons again turned down the Revised Prayer Book, as if it tremendously mattered.

He did, however, blame those who had stepped out of panic only to sink back into hypnosis. “These are the last days,” he said to me once. “We are like people in a trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical power to press down. We should be arming now, if we had sense,—arming day and night and seven days of the week,—for if the Munich pact had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle. And we are doing nothing—caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation. We don’t realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years.”

While she was bargaining Smith would often stop to listen to some street-corner orator haranguing the multitude—the multitude consisting, as a rule, of a few apathetic onlookers, workingmen with one hand round the bowl of a pipe and the other in a trouser pocket. “The typical English attitude,” Blampied commented afterwards, “good-humored, tolerant, vaguely skeptical—skeptical just as much of the truth as of lies. What a lot it will take to move men like that, but when they do move—they ever move—what a cataclysm!”

Maybe you were surprised when I asked you whether you and Paula could use the same toothbrush? You see I have never married, so I don’t know whether physical oneness goes as far as that—but I do know that in the realm of mental and spiritual things there can be a similar oneness—the knowledge that yours and mine are no longer yours and mine, but ours for every possible use. And this awareness, once acknowledged by both parties, lasts forever.

He was so happy over all this that it came to him with a sense of retrospective discovery that he must like children—not sentimentally, but with a simple, almost casual affection. “You’d have made a good schoolmaster,” Blampied once said, and then, when Smith replied he wasn’t sure he’d care to spend all his time with children, the other added: “Exactly. Good schoolmasters don’t. Anyhow, you can help to make up for the fact that I’m a bad parson.” “Do you really think you are?” “Oh yes. Ask anybody round here. People don’t take to me. I haven’t an ounce of crowd magnetism. And then I’m lazy. Only physically, I think, but then that’s the only kind of laziness most people recognize.”

The question of country footpaths was, he admitted, his King Charles’s Head—every man, he added, should have some small matter to which he attaches undue importance, always provided that he realizes the undueness.

They obviously regarded the parson as an oddity, but being country people they knew that men, like trees and unlike suburban houses, were never exactly the same, and this idea of unsameness as the pattern of life meant that (as Blampied put it) they didn’t think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd.

“Life’s more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don’t ever join them. They’re the gravediggers of our civilization—the safe men, the compromisers, the money-makers, the muddlers-through.