Random Harvest (Audiobook Companion)

by James Hilton

Their inconspicuous correctness makes almost a display of concealment. As he looked out of the window

a change from a glance to a gaze and then from a gaze to a glare, a sudden sharpening of focus, as when a person thinks he recognizes someone fleetingly in a crowd.

I felt that these trivial exchanges were to cover an inner stress of mind he was trying to master.

"Yes, and 'thanks' is right. Surely we English need some release from the tyranny of the stiff upper lip."

being—if it isn't too absurd to say such a thing— of being HALF SOMEBODY ELSE. Some casual little thing—a tune or a scent or a name in a newspaper or a look of something or somebody will remind me, just for a second—and yet I haven't time to get any grip of what it DOES remind me of—it's a sort of wisp of memory that can't be trapped before it fades away... For instance, when I saw that mountain this morning I felt I'd been there—I almost KNEW I'd been there... I could see that lake between the summits—why, I'd BATHED in it—there was a slab of rock jutting out like a diving-board—and the day I was there I fell asleep in the shade and woke up in the sun... but I suppose I've got to believe the whole thing never happened, just because you say there isn't a lake there at all... Does all this strike you as the most utter nonsense?"

crudely—that dreams DO foretell the future, only by the time they come true, we've forgotten them—all except your elusive wisp of memory."

the purging of the inhibitions, didn't you call it?

"Most people have a spot of lunacy in them somewhere. It's excusable."

"Provided they don't inflict it on strangers." "Why not, if you feel you

that, on his side, the anonymity had been not only an encouragement to talk, but a temptation to reveal himself almost to the point of self-exhibition.

disclose. Men in whom reticence is a part of good form have fantastic ways of occasional escape, and I should have been the last to embarrass an interesting fellow traveller had he not added, as the train began braking into St. Pancras: "Well, it's been a pleasant chat. Some day—who knows?—we might run into each other again."

was—a guest of honour about to perform his duties with the touch of apathy that so effectively disguises the British technique of authority.

with one of the best after-dinner speeches I had ever heard.

indecision, I still hope that some day I shall throw off the cares of too many enterprises and seek the tranquillity of a room overlooking a quadrangle and an oak that can be sported against the world."

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

And there are other worlds, too—wish sometimes I could get into any of them—out of my own."

strain. Most of us were both —tired of the war and everything connected with it, eager to push ahead into something new.

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?'

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."

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?"

were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other."

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."

'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."

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.'"

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."

"So a perfect stranger could walk into your house and get a free lunch?"

I knew quite well that the House of Commons, along with the Stock Exchange and Christ Church, Oxford, was called "the House," yet somehow,

"So I wondered if you'd care for a secretary's job until something else turns up?"

suppose she has taste—that is if you LIKE a house that's like a museum. I sometimes wonder if Charles does."

I always write a little note of thanks to anyone who sends a NICE letter... of course I write as if he'd dictated it... I really think a good secretary SHOULD do little things like that on her

Not that Charles would be an easy man to MAKE happy, even if he HAD got the right woman. But he isn't happy NOW—that I DO know—there's always a look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn't find it."

And by the way, did she tell you I'm not happy with my wife?" "Well—er—"

high: "Collapse of England." At that moment I felt that one

Hobbs had said about him WAS true —that look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn't find it. He began to talk rapidly and nervously, apropos of the placard: "Odd to think of some foreigner translating without knowing it's only about cricket...

"England Now Without Hope." Rainier laughed. "Maybe some fussy archaeologist of the twenty-fifth century— a relative of Macaulay's sketching New Zealander—will dig this up from a rubbish-heap and say it establishes definite proof that we'd all been well warned in advance... Has my wife got a party tonight?" "Yes." "What sort of a crowd?"

gesture, the orchestration of some inner emotion turbulent under the surface. Nor, one felt, would such emotion wear out in fatigue, but rather increase to some extinguishing climax as an electric globe burns brighter before the final snapping of the filament. It was of this I felt suddenly afraid, and he noticed the anxious

? Don't you sometimes feel how FALSE it all is, and how falsely reassuring—this nineteenth-century gloss of statistical accuracy, as if the flood tide of history could run in rivulets tidy enough for garden irrigation, safe enough for a million taps in suburban bathrooms... but when the storm does come, who'll give a damn if the rows of little figures still add up—who'll care if the sums are all wrong provided one man knows a right answer?"

A cold day, and as we stood waiting at the door I could see a great yellow glow of firelight behind the lace curtains of the parlour window. Nothing extraordinary in that, either, and yet... it's hard to describe the feelings I had, as if that house were waiting for me—a welcome—out of the wintry dusk and into the warm firelight... a welcome home."

straight into the warmth and firelight. There was a kettle steaming on the hob, cups and saucers set out, plates of bread and butter. Everything spotlessly neat, furniture that shone, a clock ticking loudly somewhere. It was all so beautiful, this warm small room. The man kept talking about his wife—how proud she'd been at the thought of having two such men as Nixon and myself to tea in her home —such an honour—she'd never forget it—and how embarrassed she'd be when she came back and found us already there. 'I'll bet she's gone round the corner for a Dundee cake,' he laughed. But as time passed he

"No, she didn't come back in time... But that room—the feeling I had in it—of comfort, of being WANTED there... It's just another thing of the same kind. That part of my life—well, you remember what I told you at Cambridge."

"I wouldn't if it would leave me alone. But it keeps on teasing me— with clues. So what can I do?"

"Since we now realize that most things are wrong with the world— " "I know—that

world, but when all was said and done, there was nothing to fear while the stately Holmes of England, doped and dressing-gowned for action, readied his wits for the final count with Moriarty! And who the deuce WAS this Moriarty? Why, just a big-shot crook whom the honest idiot romanticized in order to build up his hero's reputation! Nothing but a middle-aged stoop-shouldered Raffles! And that, mind you, was the worst our fathers' world could imagine when it talked about Underground Forces and Powers of Evil!... Ah, well, happy days. You'd better keep the cab to go home in. Good night!" * * * * * I hadn't taken Rainier's problem very seriously till then. For one thing, loss of memory is normal. We all forget things, and are equally likely to be reminded of them long after we think they have been forgotten for good. Often, too, the reminder is faint enough to be no more than a clue which we fail to follow up because the matter does not seem important. The unusual part of Rainier's experience was that he DID think it important, so that from something merely puzzling it was already on the way to becoming an obsession. Some part of his story could doubtless be verified, and I already felt enough curiosity to make the attempt. I said nothing to him,

because English people mistrust perfection, regarding it in manners as the stigma of foreigners, just as they suspect it in teeth to be the product of dentistry. All this, of course, I did not discuss with Miss Hobbs.

"You mean MRS. Rainier? You mean she was his secretary before Miss Hobbs?" "Oh, the Hobbs woman

"On a point of psychology I think you're wrong. She'd prefer to conceal the fact that though they were both, so to say, equal at the starting-post, the other woman won." "Maybe. I gather you know Rainier

well. But all this relentless celebrity-hunting and party-giving doesn't make a home—and I'm damned if I know what it DOES make."

"Simply that I've always considered him—abstractly—one of the rare spirits of our time, so that success of the kind he has attained and may yet attain becomes a detestable self-betrayal."

the QUALITY of the man, not his opportunities. I suppose