Random Harvest E-Book

James Hilton

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Französisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An engrossing tale of a man who loses his memory due to being shelled in the Great War, eventually finds happiness with a young actress, and then is knocked down on a Liverpool street. He regains consciousness and knows he's a member of a prominent and wealthy family. He begins to reconstruct his life again, knowing all the while that something.and someone.is missing

Leseprobe

RANDOM

HARVEST

© 2020 Librorium Editions

“According to a British Official Report, bombs

fell at Random.”

ONE

N THE morning of the eleventh of November, 1937, precisely at eleven o’clock, some well-meaning busybody consulted his watch and loudly announced the hour, with the result that all of us in the dining car felt constrained to put aside drinks and newspapers and spend the two minutes’ silence in rather embarrassed stares at one another or out of the window. Not that anyone had intended disrespect—merely that in a fast-moving train we knew no rules for correct behavior and would therefore rather not have behaved at all. Anyhow, it was during those tense uneasy seconds that I first took notice of the man opposite. Dark-haired, slim, and austerely good-looking, he was perhaps in his early or middle forties; he wore an air of prosperous distinction that fitted well with his neat but quiet standardized clothes. I could not guess whether he had originally moved in from a third- or a first-class compartment. Half a million Englishmen are like that. Their inconspicuous correctness makes almost a display of concealment.

As he looked out of the window I saw something happen to his eyes—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. Meanwhile a lurch of the train spilt coffee on the table between us, providing an excuse for apologies as soon as the two minutes were over; I got in with mine first, but by the time he turned to reply the focus was lost, his look of recognition unsure. Only the embarrassment remained, and to ease it I made some comment on the moorland scenery, which was indeed somberly beautiful that morning, for overnight snow lay on the summits, and there was one of them, twin-domed, that seemed to keep pace with the train, moving over the intervening valley like a ghostly dromedary. “That’s Mickle,” I said, pointing to it.

Surprisingly he answered: “Do you know if there’s a lake—quite a small lake—between the peaks?”

Two men at the table across the aisle then intervened with the instant garrulousness of those who overhear a question put to someone else. They were also, I think, moved by a common desire to talk down an emotional crisis, for the entire dining car seemed suddenly full of chatter. One said there was such a lake, if you called it a lake, but it was really more of a swamp; and the other said there wasn’t any kind of lake at all, though after heavy rain it might be “a bit soggy” up there, and then the first man agreed that maybe that was so, and presently it turned out that though they were both Derbyshire men, neither had actually climbed Mickle since boyhood.

We listened politely to all this and thanked them, glad to let the matter drop. Nothing more was said till they left the train at Leicester; then I leaned across the table and said: “It doesn’t pay to argue with local inhabitants, otherwise I’d have answered your question myself—because I was on top of Mickle yesterday.”

A gleam reappeared in his eyes. “You were?”

“Yes, I’m one of those eccentric people who climb mountains for fun all the year round.”

“So you saw the lake?”

“There wasn’t a lake or a swamp or a sign of either.”

“Ah. . . .” And the gleam faded.

“You sound disappointed?”

“Well no—hardly that. Maybe I was thinking of somewhere else. I’m afraid I’ve a bad memory.”

“For mountains?”

“For names too. Mickle, did you say it was?” He spoke the word as if he were trying the sound of it.

“That’s the local name. It isn’t important enough to be on maps.”

He nodded and then, rather deliberately, held up a newspaper throughout a couple of English counties. The sight of soldiers marching along a Bedfordshire lane gave us our next exchange of remarks—something about Hitler, the European situation, chances of war, and so on. It led to my asking if he had served in the last war.

“Yes.”

“Then there must be things you wish you had forgotten?”

“But I have—even them—to some extent.” He added as if to deflect the subject from himself: “I imagine you were too young?”

“Too young for the last, but not for the next, the way things are going.”

“Nobody will be either too young or too old for the next.”

Meanwhile men’s voices were uprising further along the car in talk of Ypres and Gallipoli; I called his attention and commented that thousands of other Englishmen were doubtless at that moment reminiscing about their war experiences. “If you’ve already forgotten yours, you’re probably lucky.”

“I didn’t say I’d forgotten everything.”

He then told me a story which I shall summarize as follows: During the desperate months of trench warfare in France an English staff officer reasoned that if some spy whom the Germans had learned to trust were to give them false details about a big attack, it might have a better chance of success. The first step was to establish the good faith of such a spy, and this seemed only possible by allowing him, over a considerable period, to supply true information. Accordingly, during several weeks before the planned offensive, small raiding parties crawled across no man’s land at night while German machine gunners, having been duly tipped off as to time and place, slaughtered them with much precision. One of these doomed detachments was in charge of a youth who, after enlisting at the beginning of the war, had just begun his first spell in the front line. Quixotically eager to lead his men to storybook victory, he soon found that his less-inspiring task was to accompany a few wounded and dying survivors into a shell hole so close to the enemy trenches that he could pick up snatches of German conversation. Knowing the language fairly well, he connected something he heard with something he had previously overheard in his commanding officer’s dugout; so that presently he was able to deduce the whole intrigue of plot and counterplot. It came to him as an additional shock as he lay there, half drowned in mud, delirious with the pain of a smashed leg, and sick with watching the far greater miseries of his companions. Before dawn a shell screamed over and burst a few yards away, killing the others and wounding him in the head so that he saw, heard, and could think no more.

“What happened to him afterwards?”

“Oh, he recovered pretty well—except for partial loss of memory. . . . He’s still alive. Of course, when you come to think about it logically, the whole thing was as justifiable as any other piece of wartime strategy. The primary aim is to frustrate the enemy’s knavish tricks. Anything that does so is the thing to do, even if it seems a bit knavish itself.”

“You say that defensively, as if you had to keep on convincing yourself about it.”

“I wonder if you’re right.”

“I wonder if you’re the survivor who’s still alive?”

He hesitated a moment, then answered with an oblique smile: “I don’t suppose you’d believe me even if I said no.” I let it go at that, and after a pause he went on: “It’s curious to reflect that one’s death was planned by both sides—it gives an extra flavor to the life one managed to sneak away with, as well as a certain irony to the mood in which one wears a decoration.”

“So I should imagine.”

I waited for him to make some further comment but he broke a long silence only to summon the waiter and order a whiskey and soda. “You’ll have one with me?”

“No thanks.”

“You don’t drink?”

“Not very often in the morning.”

“Neither do I, as a rule. Matter of fact, I don’t drink much at all.”

I felt that these trivial exchanges were to cover an inner stress of mind he was trying to master. “Coming back to what you were saying,” I coaxed, eventually, but he interrupted: “No, let’s not come back to it—no use raking over these things. Besides, everybody’s so bored with the last war and so scared of the next that it’s almost become a social gaffe to bring up the matter at all.”

“Except on one day of the year—which happens to be today. Then the taboos are lifted.”

“Thanks to the rather theatrical device of the two minutes’ silence?”

“Yes, and ‘thanks’ is right. Surely we English need some release from the tyranny of the stiff upper lip.”

He smiled into his drink as the waiter set it before him. “So you think it does no harm—once a year?”

“On the contrary, I think it makes a very healthy purge of our normal—which is to say, our abnormal—national inhibitions.”

Another smile. “Maybe—if you like psychoanalyst’s jargon.”

“Evidently you don’t.”

“Sorry. If you’re one of them, I apologize.”

“No, I’m just interested in the subject, that’s all.”

“Ever studied it—seriously?”

I said I had, which was true, for I had written several papers on it for the Philosophical Society. He nodded, then read again for a few score miles. The train was traveling fast, and when next he looked up it was as if he realized that anything he still had to say must be hurried; we were already streaking past the long rows of suburban back gardens. He suddenly resumed, with a touch of his earlier eagerness: “All right then—listen to this—and don’t laugh . . . it may be up your street. . . . Sometimes I have a feeling of 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?”

“By no means. It’s not an uncommon experience.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” He looked slightly dismayed, perhaps robbed of some comfort in finding himself not unique.

“Dunne says it’s due to a half-remembered dream. You should read his book An Experiment with Time. He says—this, of course, is condensing his theory very 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.”

“So I once dreamed about that mountain?”

“Perhaps. It’s an interesting theory even if it can’t be proved. Anyhow, the feeling you have is quite a normal one.”

“I don’t feel that it is altogether normal, the way I have it.”

“You mean it’s beginning to worry you?”

“Perhaps sometimes—in a way—yes.” He added with a nervous smile: “But that’s no reason why I should worry you. I can only plead this one-day-a-year excuse—the purging of the inhibitions, didn’t you call it? Let’s talk about something else—cricket—the Test Match. . . . Wonder what will happen to England . . . ?”

“Somehow today that doesn’t sound like cricket talk.”

“I know. After the silence there are overtones . . . but all I really wanted to prove was that I’m not a complete lunatic.”

“Most people have a spot of lunacy in them somewhere. Its excusable.”

“Provided they don’t inflict it on strangers.”

“Why not, if you feel you want to?”

“I don’t want to—not consciously.”

“Unconsciously then. Which makes it worst of all. Not that in your case it sounds very serious.”

“You don’t think so? You don’t think these—er—peculiarities of memory—are—er—anything to worry about?”

“Since you ask me, may I be perfectly frank?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know what your work is, but isn’t it possible you’ve been overdoing things lately—not enough rest—relaxation?”

“I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that. My doctor does—every time I see him.”

“Then why not take his advice?”

“This is why.” He pulled a small notebook from his vest pocket. “I happen to be in what is vaguely called public life—which means I’m on a sort of treadmill I can’t get off until it stops—and it won’t stop.” He turned over the pages. “Just to show you—a sample day of my existence. . . . Here, you can read it—it’s typed.” He added, as I took the book: “My secretary—very neat. She wouldn’t let me forget anything.”

“But she can’t spell ‘archaeological.’ ”

“Why does she have to?” He snatched the book back for scrutiny and I had the feeling he was glad of the excuse to do so and keep it. “Calderbury Archaeological and Historical Society? . . . Oh, they’re my constituents—I have to show them round the House—guidebook stuff—an awful bore . . . that’s this afternoon. This evening I have an Embassy reception; then tomorrow there’s a board meeting, a lunch party, and in the evening I’m guest speaker at a dinner in Cambridge.”

“Doesn’t look as if there’s anything you could cut except possibly tomorrow’s lunch.”

“I expect I’ll do that, anyway—even though it’s at my own house. There’ll be a crowd of novelists and actors and titled people who’d think me surly because I wouldn’t talk to them half as freely as I’m talking to you now.”

I could believe it. So far he had made no move towards an exchange of names between us, and I guessed 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. And there had been a certain impish exhilaration in the way he had allowed me to glance at his engagement book for just those few seconds, as if teasing me with clues to an identity he had neither wish nor intention to 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 traveler 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.”

Spoken as if he sincerely half meant it, the remark merely emphasized the other half sense in which he did not mean it at all; and this, because I already liked him, irked me to the reply: “If it’s the Swithin’s Dinner tomorrow night we may as well introduce ourselves now as then, because I’ll be there too. My name’s Harrison. I’m on the Reception Committee.”

“Oh, really?”

“And I don’t know what your plans are, but after the show I’d be delighted if you’d come up to my rooms and have some coffee.”

“Thanks,” he muttered with sudden glumness, gathering up his newspapers and brief case. Then I suppose he realized it would be pointless, as well as discourteous, to refuse the name which I should inevitably discover so soon. He saved it for a last unsmiling afterthought as he jumped to the platform. “My name’s Rainier . . . Charles Rainier.”

*        *        *

Rainier nodded rather coldly when I met him again the following day. In his evening clothes and with an impressive array of decorations he looked what he was—a guest of honor about to perform his duties with the touch of apathy that so effectively disguises the British technique of authority. Not necessarily an aristocratic technique. I had already looked him up in reference books and found that he was the son of a longish line of manufacturers—no blue blood, no title (I wondered how he had evaded that), a public school of the second rank, Parliamentary membership for a safe Conservative county. I had also mentioned his name to a few people I knew; the general impression was that he was rich and influential, and that I was lucky to have made such a chance encounter. He did not, however, belong to the small group of well-known personalities recognizable by the man-in-the-street either in the flesh or in Low cartoons. On the contrary he seemed neither to seek nor to attract the popular sort of publicity, nor yet to repel it so markedly as to get in reverse; it was as if he deliberately aimed at being nondescript. A journalist told me he would be difficult to build up as a newspaper hero because his personality was “centripetal” instead of “centrifugal”; I was not quite certain what this meant, but Who’s Who was less subtle in confiding that his recreations were mountaineering and music.

On the whole I secured a fair amount of information without much real enlightenment; I hoped for more from a second meeting and traveled to Cambridge in a mood of considerable anticipation. It was the custom of the secretary and committee of the Swithin’s Society to receive guests informally before dining in the College Hall; so we gathered first in the Combination Room, where we made introductions, drank sherry, and exchanged small talk. It is really hard to know what to say to distinguished people when you first meet them—that is, it is hard to think of talk small enough to be free from presumption. Rainier, for instance, had lately been in the financial news in connection with a proposed merger of cement companies, a difficult achievement for which negotiations were still proceeding; but it was impossible to say “How is your merger getting on?” as one might say “How are your chrysanthemums?” to a man whom you knew to be an enthusiastic gardener. Presently, to my relief, some other guests arrived whom I had to attend to, and it was perhaps a quarter of an hour before I saw him edging to me through the crowd. “Sorry,” he began, “but I’ve got to let you down—awful toothache—where’s the nearest dentist?” I hustled him out as inconspicuously as possible and at the door of the taxi received his promise to return to the dinner if he felt equal to it. Then I went back and explained to the company what had happened. Somehow it did not sound very convincing, and none of us really expected to see him again. But we did. An hour later he took the vacant place we had left at the High Table and was just in time to reply to the toast with one of the best after-dinner speeches I had ever heard. Maybe the escape from physical pain plus the Cambridge atmosphere, with its mingling of time-honored formality and youthful high spirits, suited a mood in which he began with badinage about toothache and ended with a few graceful compliments to the College and University. Among other things I remember him recalling that during his undergraduate days he had had an ambition to live at Cambridge all his life, as a don of some sort (laughter), but exactly what sort he hadn’t stayed long enough to decide (laughter), because fate had called him instead to be some sort of businessman politician, but even what sort of that he hadn’t yet entirely made up his mind (more laughter). . . . “So because of this fundamental 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.” (Prolonged laughter in which the speaker joined.) After he had finished, we all cheered uproariously and then, relaxing, drank and argued and made a night of it in the best Swithin’s tradition; when eventually the affair broke up, it was Rainier himself who asked if my invitation to coffee still held good.

“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 behavior. 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 decent 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 halfway 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—aftereffects 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 psychoanalysis 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 neighbors 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 halfway 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 halfway 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.”

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

“They’re doing that all the time—though most of ’em have invitations. . . . Look here, if you’re not busy just now, why not come over to the House for tea?”

I said I would, and took the bus again to Chelsea. But at Kenmore the maid told me that Rainier hadn’t been in since morning and never by any chance took tea at home; and just then, while we were arguing on the doorstep (I insisting I had been invited less than twenty minutes ago), Mrs. Rainier came up behind me and began to laugh. “He meant the House of Commons,” she said, passing into the hall. “You’d better let my car take you there.”

Extraordinary how stupid one can be when one would prefer to impress by being knowledgeable. I knew quite well that the House of Commons, along with the Stock Exchange and Christchurch, Oxford, was called “the House,” yet somehow, when Rainier had used the phrase over the telephone, I could only think of Kenmore. Most of the way to Westminster in the almost aggressively unostentatious Daimler (so impersonal you could believe it part of an undertaker’s fleet), I cursed my mistake as a poor recommendation for any kind of job. I had feared Rainier might be waiting for me, and was relieved when, after sending in my name, I had to kill time for half an hour before a policeman led me through devious passages to the Terrace, where Rainier greeted me warmly. But his appearance was slightly disconcerting; there was a twitch about his mouth and eyes as he spoke, and a general impression of intense nervous energy in desperate need of relaxation. During tea he talked about his South American trip, assuming far too modestly that I had read nothing about it in the papers. Presently the division bell rang and only as we hurried across the Smoke Room did he broach the matter I had really come about. “I inquired from a good many people after I got your letter, Harrison, but there doesn’t seem to be a thing doing in Fleet Street just now.”

“That was my own experience too.”

“So I wondered if you’d care for a secretary’s job until something else turns up?”

I hadn’t really thought about such a thing, and maybe hesitation revealed my disappointment.

He said, patting my arm: “Well, think it over, anyway. I’ve had a girl up to now, but she’s due to get married in a few weeks—time enough to show you the ropes . . . that is, of course, if you feel you’d like the job at all. . . .”

*        *        *

So I became Rainier’s secretary, and Miss Hobbs showed me the ropes. It had been flattery to call her a girl. She was thin, red-faced, middle-aged, and so worshipful of Rainier that no husband could hope to get more than a remnant of any emotion she was capable of; indeed, I felt that the chance of marriage was tempting her more because she feared it might be her last than because she was certain she wanted it. She hinted this much during our first meeting. “I almost feel I’m deserting him,” she said, and the stress on “him” was revealing. Presently, showing me how she filed his correspondence, she added: “I’m so relieved he isn’t going to have another lady secretary. I’d be afraid of some awful kind of person coming here and—perhaps—influencing him.”

I said I didn’t imagine Rainier was the type to be influenced by that kind of woman.

“Oh, but you never know what kind of a woman will influence a man.”

We went on inspecting the filing system. “The main thing is to see he doesn’t forget his appointments. He doesn’t do much of his correspondence here—he has another secretary at his City office. So it won’t matter a great deal if you don’t know shorthand and typewriting.”

I said I did know shorthand and typewriting.

“Well, so much the better, of course. You’ll find him wonderful to work with—at least I always have, though of course we’re more like old friends than employer and secretary. I call him Charles, you know, when we’re alone together. And he always calls me Elsie, whether we’re alone or not. We’ve been together now for nearly fifteen years, so it’s really quite natural, don’t you think?”

During the next few hours she gave me her own version of the entire Rainier ménage. “Of course the marriage never has been all it should be—I daresay you can imagine that. Mrs. Rainier isn’t the right kind of wife for a man like Charles. He’s so tired of all those parties she gives, especially the houseparties at Stourton—that’s their big place in the country, you know . . . they have no children—that’s another thing, because he’d love children, and I don’t know why they don’t have them, maybe there’s a reason. When you’ve worked with him for a time you’ll feel how restless he is—I do blame her for that—she doesn’t give him a proper home—Kenmore’s just a hotel with different guests every day. I do believe there’s only one room he feels really comfortable in, and that’s this one—with his poor little secretary slaving away while he smokes—and he shouldn’t smoke either, so he’s been told. . . . D’you know, he often locks himself in when he wants to work, because the rest of the house is so full of Goyas and Epsteins and whatnot that people wander in and out of all the rooms as if it were a museum. Of course there really are priceless things in it—why not?—he gives her the money to spend, and I suppose she has taste—that is if you like a house that’s like a museum. I sometimes wonder if Charles does.”

After a pause during which I made no comment she turned to the writing desk. “Charles gets hundreds of letters from complete strangers—about one thing and another, you know. If they’re abusive we take no notice—in fact, whatever they are, he doesn’t bother much about them, but I’ll let you into a secret—something he doesn’t suspect and never will unless you tell him, and I’m sure you won’t—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 own, don’t you?”

I said nothing.

“Really, if he were to ask me to stay, I believe I would, marriage or no marriage—I mean, it would be so hard to refuse him anything—but then, he’s too fine and generous to ask—as soon as he knew about it he urged me not to delay my happiness on his account—just as if his own marriage had brought him happiness. . . . 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.”

For two or three days Miss Hobbs continued to show me the ropes; Rainier was away in Lancashire. During this time Mrs. Rainier gave several lunch parties to which I was not invited, though I was in the house at the time and was even privileged to give assistance to a foreign plenipotentiary who spoke little English and had strayed into the study in search of a humbler apartment. I could better understand after that why Rainier sometimes locked the door.

Then he returned, having wired me to meet his train at Euston. As soon as we had found a taxi and were driving out of the station he asked me how I’d been getting on, and added without waiting for an answer: “I don’t suppose you’ll find it hard to be as good as your predecessor.”

I said I should certainly hope to be.

“Then you’ve already found out a few of the things I’ve been putting up with?”

“Yes, but not why you have put up with them, for so many years.”

“Pure sentiment, plus the fact that I’ve always had a submerged sympathy with crazy people, and Elsie’s crazy enough. She used to work at Stourton in my father’s time, then she worked for my brother, and when he naturally wanted to get rid of her there was no one fool enough to take her but me. I made her my social secretary—because in those days I had no social life and it didn’t matter. But after I married there were social things for her to do and she did them with a peculiar and fascinating idiocy. D’you know I’ve found out she writes long letters to people I’ve never heard of and signs my name to them? . . . And by the way, did she tell you I’m not happy with my wife?”

“Well—er—”

“Don’t believe it. My wife and I are the best of friends. I suppose she also hinted it was a marriage of convenience?”

I felt this was incriminating Miss Hobbs too much and was beginning a noncommittal answer when he interrupted: “Well, that happens to be true. I married her because it seemed to me she’d be just the person to turn a tired businessman into a thumping success. She was and she did. . . . Can you think of a better reason?”

“There’s generally considered to be one better reason.”

He switched the subject suddenly, pointing out of the window to a news placard that proclaimed, in letters a foot high: “Collapse of England.” At that moment I felt that one thing Miss 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 . . . it was something you said about that on a train that first made me want to know you better—but really, in a sense, it doesn’t refer to cricket at all, but to how God-damned sure we are of ourselves—you can’t imagine the same phrase in the streets of Paris or Berlin—it would begin panic or riots or something. . . . Just think of it—‘Débâcle de France’ or ‘Untergang Deutschlands.’ . . . Impossible . . . but here it means nothing because we don’t believe it could ever happen—and that’s not wishful thinking—it’s neither wishing nor thinking, but a kind of inbreathed illusion. . . . Reminds me of that last plenary session of the London Conference when it was quite clear there was to be no effective disarmament by anybody and we were all hard at work covering up the failure of civilization’s last hope with a mess of smeary platitudes . . . Lord, how tired I was, listening to strings of words that meant nothing in any language and even less when you had to wait for an interpreter to turn ’em into two others . . . and all the time the dusty sunlight fell in slabs over the pink bald heads—godheads from the power entrusted to them and gargoyles from the way I hated ’em . . . and during all that morning, full of the trapped sunlight and the distant drone of traffic past the Cenotaph, there was only one clean eager thing that happened—young Drexel whispering to me during a tepid outburst of applause: ‘See the old boy in the third row—fifth from the end—Armenia or Irak or some place . . . but did you ever see anybody more like Harry Tate?’ . . . And by Jove, he was like Harry Tate, and Drexel and I lived on it for the rest of the session—lived on it and on our own pathetic fancy that foreigners were strange and at best amusing creatures, rather like music hall comedians or one’s French master at school—tolerable if they happen to be musicians or dancers or ice-cream sellers—but definitely to be snubbed if they venture on the really serious business of governing the world. . . . Look—there’s another!” It was a later placard, proclaiming in letters equally large, “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?”

“Mostly sporting and dramatic, I think.”

“Then I’ll dine and sleep at the Club. Borotra’s the only dramatic sportsman I care about, and he probably won’t come.”

He put his head out of the cab window, giving the change of address, and also telling the man to drive more slowly. I could see he was nervously excited, and I was beginning to know by now that when he was in such a mood he talked a good deal in an attempt to race his thoughts—an attempt which usually failed, leaving a litter of unfinished sentences, mixed metaphors, and unpolished epigrams, with here and there some phrase worthy of one of his speeches, but flung off so carelessly that if the hearer did not catch it at the time Rainier himself could never recall it afterwards. I have tried to give an impression of this kind of talk, but even the most faithful reportage would miss a curious excitement of voice and 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 look I gave him.

“Sorry to be a chatterer like this, Harrison, but it’s after a bout of public speech-making—I always feel I have to use up the words left over, or perhaps the words I couldn’t use. . . . I suppose you’d call me a rather good speaker?”

I said I certainly should.

“And you’d guess that it comes easily to me?”

“It always sounds like it.”

He laughed. “That’s what practice can do. I loathe speaking in public—I’m always secretly afraid I’m going to break down or stammer or something. Stammering especially . . . of course I never do. . . . By the way, you remember that mountain in Derbyshire I thought I recognized?”

“Yes.”

“The same sort of thing happened in Lancashire, only it wasn’t quite so romantic. Just a house in a row. I was helping Nixon in the Browdley by-election—we held meetings at street corners, then Nixon dragged me round doing the shake-hands and baby-kissing stuff—that’s the way his father got into the Gladstone Parliaments, so Nixon still does it. I admit I’m pretty cynical about elections—the very look of the voting results, with two rows of figures adding neatly up to a third one, gives me the same itch as a company balance sheet, exact to the last penny . . . whose penny? Was there ever a penny? . . . My own majority in Lythamshire, for instance—precisely twelve—but who were the twelve? Twelve good men and true, maybe, or twelve drunken illiterates . . . ? 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?”

“You were talking about a house.”

“Oh yes. . . . Just an ordinary four-room workingman’s house—tens of thousands like it. 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 parlor 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.”

His eyes were full of eagerness, and I said, trying to hasten his story before we reached the end of the journey: “Did the feeling disappear when a stranger answered the door?”

“I’m coming to that. . . . There were three of us, Nixon, myself, and Ransome, the local party secretary, nice little man. We knocked and knocked and nobody came. Then I saw Ransome fumbling in his pocket. ‘Can’t think where she is,’ he said, ‘but I expect she’ll be back in a jiffy.’ I realized then that it was his house, and that we were being invited in. He found a key, unlocked the door, and we entered. No lobby or hall—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 honor—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 began to be a bit embarrassed himself, and presently suggested having tea ourselves without waiting for his wife. So we did—I sat in a rocking chair by the fireside, and the flames were still leaping up so brightly we didn’t need any other light, even though it was quite dark outside by the time we left.”

“So you never saw his wife at all?”

“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.”

“Why do you worry about it so much?”

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

“I still say—more rest and less work.”

He patted my arm. “It’s good to know I can talk to you whenever I’m in this mood. Watson to my Sherlock, eh? Or perhaps that’s not much of a compliment?”

“Not to yourself, anyhow. Watson was at least an honest idiot.”

He smiled. “That must be the Higher Criticism. Of course you were born too late to feel as I did—Sherlock’s in Baker Street, all’s right with the world.”

“Since we now realize that most things are wrong with the world—”

“I know—that was part of the illusion. I remember Sheldon taking me on a trip to London when I was six or seven years old . . . the first place I asked to see was Baker Street, and being a sympathetic fellow he didn’t tell me that the stories were just stories. We walked gravely along the pavement one afternoon early in the century—a small boy and his father’s butler—looking up at the tall houses with respectful hero worship. Distant thrones might totter, anarchists might throw bombs, a few lesser breeds might behave provokingly in odd corners of the 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, but the next time the chance occurred I led Miss Hobbs to talk in a general way about her employer’s early life and career. She was more than willing—except for a continual tendency to drift into later and somewhat disparaging gossip about Mrs. Rainier. “Wasn’t he in the war?” I began, putting the leading question that anyone might have asked.

“Oh yes. He got a medal—didn’t you know that? And the strange thing was—they thought he was dead. So it was given post—post—”

“Posthumously.”

“Yes, that’s it. But you couldn’t blame them, because after the attack he was reported missing and nothing was heard about him till—oh, it was years later when he suddenly arrived home without any warning. And then it turned out he’d lost his memory.”

“Seems to me the sort of story for headlines.”

“You mean in the papers? Oh no, it was kept out—the family didn’t want any publicity.”

“That wouldn’t have been enough reason for most of the journalists I know.”

“Ah, but Sheldon arranged it.”

“Sheldon?”

“He’s the butler at Stourton. You haven’t been to Stourton yet, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s really a marvelous place.”

“Sheldon sounds a marvelous butler if he knows how to stop journalists from getting a good story and editors from printing it.”

“Well, he is rather marvelous, and I don’t suppose there’s much he doesn’t know—not about the family, anyhow. He really rules Stourton—lives there all the year round, even during the winter when the family never go out of town. I really owe him a good deal—I was only just a local girl in those days, I used to do bookkeeping and secretarial work at the house, and that brought me into contact with Sheldon constantly.” She added, rather coyly: “You know—perhaps you don’t know—how difficult it can be for a girl employed in a big house if the butler isn’t all he should be.”

I said I could imagine it.

“Sheldon was always a gentleman. Never a word—or a gesture—that anyone could object to.”

I said nothing.

“And later, when Mr. Charles took over Stourton, Sheldon personally asked him if he could do anything for me, otherwise I don’t suppose I’d be here.”

“I see. . . . But coming back to the time when Mr. Rainier—our Mr. Rainier, I mean—suddenly returned to Stourton. Were you working there then?”

“Not just then. It was Christmas and as old Mr. Rainier was ill they canceled the usual parties and gave me a holiday. It was parties that always kept me busy—writing out invitations and place cards and things.”

“What was Mr. Rainier like when he returned?”

“I didn’t see him till a good while afterwards, but I do know there was a lot of trouble about it, one way and another—Sheldon would never tell us half that went on.”