Random Harvest by James Hilton Read Free Book Online

added:  “Not that she isn’t a good hostess—that I WILL say.”
    Since the point was raised, it seemed to me that Mrs. Rainier was TOO good, and that for this reason she might miss the secret English bull’s-eye that can only be hit by guns sighted to a 97 or 98 per cent degree of accuracy.  Anything more than that, even if achievable, is dangerous in England, 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.
    I saw Freeman a few days later.  He had been a rather impressive figure at Cambridge, in my time as well as Rainier’s, but had recently retired to live at Richmond with an unmarried sister.  It was probably a lonely life, and he seemed glad to hear my voice on the telephone and to accept an invitation to dinner.  I had known him fairly well, since he had long been president of the Philosophical Society and I in my last year its vice-president, and though he had written several standard works on psychology he was not psychologist enough to suspect an ulterior motive behind my apparent eagerness to look him up and talk over old times.
    We met at Boulestin’s that same evening.
    After waiting patiently till the inevitable question as to what I was doing with myself nowadays, I said that I had become Rainier’s secretary.
    “Ah, Rainier—yes,” he muttered, as if raking over memories.  And he added, with a thin cackle:  “Well, history won’t repeat itself.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “He married one of them.”
    “You mean MRS. Rainier?  You mean she was his secretary before Miss Hobbs?”
    “Oh, the Hobbs woman was with him all the time—a family heirloom.  Must be forty now, if she’s a day.  What did she do at last— retire?”
    “She’s leaving to get married.”
    “Heavens—I never thought her turn would come.  Who’s the lucky man? . . .  But I can answer that myself—Rainier is, to get rid of her.”
    “You know her then?”
    “Hardly at all, I’m glad to say.  But she used to write me the most ridiculous notes whenever Rainier made an appointment to see me.  They were supposed to be from him, but I found out quite casually afterwards that she forged his name to ‘em. . . .  ABSURD notes—it interested me, as a psychologist, that she should have thought them appropriate.”
    “But to come back to Mrs. Rainier—“
    “Oh, she worked in his CITY office, I think.  A different dynasty.
    These great magnates have platoons of secretaries.”
    “Queer Miss Hobbs never mentioned it.  I should have thought it was something she’d have liked to drive home.”
    “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 rather well?”
    “I used to.  You see, I began with the initial advantage of meeting him anonymously.”
    “I’m not quite clear what you mean.”
    He expanded over a further glass of brandy.  “Rainier’s a peculiar fellow.  He has a curious fear of his own identity.  He lets you get to know him best when he doesn’t think you know who he is. . . .  It’s an interesting kink, psychologically.  I first met him through Werneth, who was his tutor at St. Swithin’s.  Apparently he told Werneth about—er—well, perhaps I ought not to discuss it, but it was something interesting to me—as a psychologist—but not particularly to Werneth, who was a mere historian.”  Again the cackle.  “Anyhow, Werneth could only get his permission to pass it on to me by promising not to divulge his name, and on hearing what it was all about I was so interested that we actually arranged a meeting—again anonymously—I wasn’t supposed to know who he was. . . .  But I’ll let you into a, secret—Werneth HAD told me, privately,