Random Harvest

Random Harvest

James Hilton

(1941)

“According to a British Official Report, bombs fell at Random.”

GERMAN OFFICIAL REPORT

PART ONE

On 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 behaviour 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 sombrely 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 camel.  “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 flavour 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 psycho-analyst’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 travelling 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.  It’s 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 psycho-analyst 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—guide-book 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.”