Random Harvest by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

beforehand—unscrupulous fellow, Werneth.  And then one morning several months later I couldn’t find my bicycle outside the college gate after a lecture, but in its place was a similar model with the name ‘Charles Rainier’ on it.  I made his mistake an excuse to call on him—and I must say—after the opening embarrassment—we very soon became friends.”  He added:  “And now, of course, I know what you’re going to ask me, but being less unscrupulous than Werneth I can’t tell you.”
    “I don’t think you need, because I already know about Rainier’s—er— peculiarity.  I suppose it WAS that.”
    “Suppose you tell me first of all what THAT is.”
    “The blank patch in his life that he can’t remember.”
    “A rather inexact description.”
    “No doubt, and that’s why I’d very much like to hear your own.”
    He smiled.  “It was an unusual case—but I’ve heard of several similar ones.  They’re recorded, you know, in technical journals.  Rainier had—if one might so put it—certain threads of recollection about the blank period, though they were so faint as to be almost non-existent at first.  After he left Cambridge we didn’t meet again for ten years—by that time the threads had become a little less faint.  It was my aim, when I came to know Rainier again after the ten-year interval, to sort out those threads, to disentangle them—to expand them, as it were, into a complete corpus of memory.”
    “I understand.  But you didn’t succeed.”
    “Are you asking me that or telling me?”
    “Both, in a way.”
    He said, smiling:  “My expectation all along had been that his full memory would eventually return—a little bit here, a little bit there—till finally, like a key turning in a lock, or like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the whole thing would slip into position.  But I gather that it hasn’t yet happened?”
    “The bits are still being assembled, but nowhere near to completion.”
    “Tell me, Harrison, if I may ask the question—why are you taking such a keen interest in this matter?  Hardly within the scope of secretarial duties. . . .  Or IS it?”
    “I like him and I hate to see him bothered by it as he still is.
    That’s the only reason.”
    “A good one.”
    “Now YOU tell ME something—have you any theories about the blank patch?”
    “Theories?  I can only guess it was a pretty bad time.  He was injured, if I remember rightly, just above the left parietal bone of the . . .”  He went off into a medical survey that conveyed nothing to me.  “It was an injury that would require operative treatment—perhaps a series of operations.  That’s why it’s perhaps a pity that he still bothers, as you say he does.  Even if complete recollection were to return to him now, it would probably be only of pain, unhappiness, boredom.”
    “On the other hand, even such memories might be better than an increasing obsession about the loss of them?”
    “Possibly.”
    We were silent for a time after that.  Presently I said:  “You know he was taken prisoner by the Germans?”
    “Oh yes.  But German or English—all hospitals are unhappy places, especially for a man who can’t tell anyone who he is.  I imagine the Germans treated him namelessly or by error under someone else’s name, and eventually returned him to England under the same condition.  Then there would be other hospitals in England, full of experiences nobody would wish to remember.  There were a great many shell-shock and loss-of-memory cases that took years—some of them are still taking years, God help them.  The whole thing happened so long ago I don’t see how we can ever expect to know all the details.  Tell me YOUR theory, if you have one.”
    “That’s the trouble, I haven’t.”
    “The real trouble, of course, is Mrs. Rainier.”
    Curious, the way people sooner or later led the talk to her.  Freeman, reticent at first about a former friend, saw no reason