Random Harvest

by James Hilton

  We sauntered across the lawn to a door in the high surrounding wall; unlocking it, she watched my face as I showed surprise, for within was a second garden, not much bigger than a large room, but so enclosed by trees and carpeted with flowers that one could hardly have believed it to exist in the middle of a London borough. "It's a secret," she confided. "I only show it to close friends— or to those who I hope are going to be."

  I murmured something polite that might equally have referred to her last remark or to the garden itself.

  "You see," she went on, "I never cared for Miss Hobbs. I don't think Charles did, either, but he was too kind to get rid of her. If she told you things against me, and I'm sure she did, just suspend judgment till you know me better."

  I went on saying polite things.

  "You and Charles first met on a train, didn't you?" She stooped to a vase. "One of those chance meetings—I've had them myself—when you tell all your secrets to a perfect stranger because you're certain you'll never meet him again. . . . Something like that?"

  I said guardedly: "I don't know about secrets, but we certainly found it easy to talk."

  "And you like your work here?"

  "Very much."

  "I'm glad. It will be wonderful if you can really help Charles— apart from just office work. He needs the right sort of companionship sometimes—he has difficult moods, you know. Or perhaps you don't know—YET. Anyhow, the thing to do is not to take him too seriously when he has them." I waited for her to continue, knowing that she too was waiting for me; even if I were willing to suspend judgment I was also, like Freeman, unwilling to trust her completely. She suddenly smiled. "Well, now you know MY secret. Keep it for me." And she added, leading me back through the doorway: "THIS, I mean. It used to be the place where the gardener threw all the rubbish. I planned it myself—I do most of the work here still. Charles never looks in—hasn't time. Hasn't time for my lunches either—not that I mind that so much, but I do wish—sometimes—I'd find him sitting here—quietly—alone—like men you sometimes see outside their cottages in the country—at peace. He never is, you know."

  I felt she would like to tell me something if I already knew enough to make it advisable, but she wasn't certain I did know, so she hesitated. I asked her why she thought he was never at peace.

  "For one thing, he's so terribly overworked."

  "Yes, I know, but apart from that?"

  "Oh, well, it's hard for anyone to feel at peace these days. Don't you think so?"

  "What about the men you sometimes see outside their cottages in the country?"

  She smiled, suddenly on the defensive, sure now that I didn't know as much as she had half suspected, and for that reason anxious not to give me any further opening. "They're probably not really at peace at all—just too old and tired to worry about things any more." As we entered the house the social manner closed about her like the fall of a curtain. "Now that we're becoming friends you must come to Stourton for week-ends as soon as we open it up. There's a REAL secret garden there—I mean one that everybody knows about."

  * * * * *

  I hadn't expected Stourton to be quite so overwhelming. We drove there a few weeks later in four Daimlers—"like a high-speed funeral," said Rainier, who was in a macabre mood altogether; three of them packed with luggage and servants from Kenmore, the first one containing ourselves and an elegant young man named Woburn, who was coming to catalogue the Stourton library. Most guests would arrive the following day—perhaps twenty-odd: politicians, peers, actors, novelists, crack tennis-players, celebrities of all kinds. It was a warm morning and as we drove through Reading and Newbury the sun broke through the haze and kindled the full splendour of an English summer, with its ever-changing greens under a dappled sky.

  Presently we turned off the main road and curved for a mile between high hedges; then suddenly, in a distant fold of the downs, a vision in cream-coloured stone broke through heavy parkland trees. Woburn, who had not seen it before, joined me in a little gasp of admiration. "You were intended to do that," said Rainier. "In fact the architect and road-builder conspired about it two hundred years ago. My brother Julian, who fancied himself as a phrase- maker, once called it 'a stucco prima donna making a stage entrance.' Now, you see, it goes out of sight." Intervening upland obscured the house for another mile or so until, at a new turn of the road, it reappeared so much more intimately that one could only give it a nod of respectful recognition. "But here we are again, and for the rest of the way we simply have to give it all the stars in Baedeker." We swooped into the final half-mile stretch that ended in a wide Palladian portico. "A house like this is like some kinds of women—too expensive even to cast off. Of course what you really pay for isn't the thing itself, but the illusion—the sense of ownership, the intangible Great I Am. Nowadays a bankrupt illusion—the farms don't pay, the hills that belong to me are just as free for anyone else to roam over, the whole idea of POSSESSING this place is just a legal fiction entitling me to pay bills. I think it would sooner possess me, if I'd let it. . . . Hello, Sheldon."

  Sheldon was waiting on the top step to welcome us. Neither plump nor cadaverous, obsequious nor pompous, he shook the hand that Rainier offered him, bowed to Mrs. Rainier, and gave Woburn and myself a faintly appraising scrutiny until Rainier made the introductions. Then he said: "Well, Mr. Harrison, if this is your first visit to Stourton it probably won't be your last. Mr. Rainier keeps his secretaries a long time." The remark struck me as rather offhandedly familiar as well as a somewhat gauche reminder of Mrs. Rainier's former position, but there was a general laugh, from which I gathered that Sheldon enjoyed privileges of this kind, perhaps on account of age. He was certainly a well- preserved antiquity, with an air of serene yet somehow guarded responsibility; in different clothes he might have looked a cabinet minister, in contradistinction to those cabinet ministers who, even in their own clothes, look like butlers.

  By the time I had been shown to my room in the East Wing (Stourton, like every grand house of its period, had to have wings) the sun was almost down over the rim of the hills and the slow magic of a summer twilight was beginning to unfold; through my window the vista of formal gardens and distant skyline was entrancingly beautiful. I was admiring it as Rainier entered with Woburn, whom he had been showing round the library. "I hope you don't object to views," he said. "I know it's the latest artistic fad to consider them rather vulgar. I put in these large windows myself, against all the advice of architects who said this sort of house shouldn't have them. Otherwise, except for a few extra bathrooms, I haven't touched the place."

  Behind the two of them stood Sheldon, announcing that our baths were ready; Rainier turned then and led us across the corridor into an extraordinary room of Moorish design embellished with fluted columns and Arabic gargoyles and a high domed ceiling. He watched our faces and seemed to derive a certain satisfaction. "My father built this," he explained, "as what he called an extra billiard- room. He made the bulk of his fortune during the Edwardian era, when the social hallmark was to have a billiard-room, and during the last year of the war, when money was coming in so fast he didn't know what to do with it, he conceived the idea of an EXTRA billiard-room as a symbol of utter superfluity. . . . At least, that's the only theory I can imagine. I don't think a single game of billiards was ever played in it, and I turned it into a bathhouse without any feeling of impiety." We passed through the room, which was furnished with divans and sun-ray lamps, into a further apartment containing a row of small but quite modern cubicle bathrooms, three of which Sheldon was already preparing for our use. "There were only four bathrooms in the entire house before I made these," Rainier continued. "One was in the servants' quarters and Sheldon had actually paid for it out of his own pocket. That gives you some idea of the times, even as late as 1919." He added, after a pause and another glance at our faces: "And of my father too—I know that's what you're thinking. But it wasn't really niggardliness. He gave a great deal during his lifetime to the more ortho
dox charities. What he mostly suffered from were a few strikingly wrong notions. One of them was doubtless that servants didn't need bathrooms. Another was that he was really an English gentleman. And another was that the remaining saga of mankind would be largely a matter of tidying up the jungle and making the whole earth a well-administered English colony under a Liberal government. I think when the war ended he assumed that's what was going to be done to Germany."

  "Maybe it should have been," said Woburn quietly. He had done little but smile until then, and I noticed Rainier give him a look of sharpened interest. Then we went into our respective cubicles, but the walls were only neck-high and conversation rose easily with the steam. I could hear Rainier and Woburn veering on to a political argument, while in my own cubicle Sheldon, arranging towels, saw me notice the slightly brown colour of the water as it filled the tub. "Won't harm you," he remarked. "We tell some of our guests it's due to mineral springs that are good for rheumatism, but as you're one of the family I'll let you into a family secret—IT'S JUST THE RUST IN THE PIPES."

  He was going out chuckling when I retorted, quite without secondary meaning: "I hope all the family secrets are as innocent."

  The chuckle ended sharply as he turned on me a look that evidently reassured him, for his mouth slanted into a slow smile as he resumed his exit. "I trust you will find them so, Mr. Harrison."

  Meanwhile Rainier had come back to the subject of Stourton, and I heard him saying to Woburn: "My father bought it after it had bankrupted the Westondales, and the Westondales inherited it from ancestors who had built it out of profits from the African slave trade. This made my father's purchase almost appropriate, since my great-great-grandfather made his pile out of the first steam-driven cotton mills in Lancashire. You may imagine Stourton, therefore, peopled with the ghosts of Negroes and little children."

  A short while later we dressed and dined in the vast room that would have seated fifty with ease, instead of our four selves. Mrs. Rainier, I noticed, was particularly gracious to Woburn, whom she probably felt to be shy in surroundings of such unaccustomed grandeur. There was talk of how he would set about the library- cataloguing job; most of the books, it appeared, had been taken over from the Westondales along with the house. "My father was not a great reader, but he had a curious knack of reading the right things. One day he read that some pine forests in Hampshire were supposed to be healthy to live amongst, so he promptly bought several hundred acres of them—on which part of Bournemouth now stands. Quite an interesting man, my father. He played the cornet, and he also cried over all Dickens's deathbed scenes— Little Nell and Paul Dombey, especially. He liked to have them read to him, for preference, and his favourite reader was an old governess of mine named Miss Ponsonby, who hated him and used to come out of one of those tearful séances muttering 'The old humbug!' But he WASN'T altogether a humbug—at least no more than most of us are. I'm not quite certain WHAT he was. . . . Somebody ought to write a really good biography of him some day. He did have one written just before he died, but it was a commissioned job and made him into a not very convincing plaster saint—and, of course, it would be easy to write the other sort, showing him as a sinister capitalistic villain. . . . But in between, somewhere, is probably the truth—if anyone thought it worth while to make the search."

  "Why shouldn't Mr. Woburn try?" asked Mrs. Rainier.

  "Not a bad idea, if he wants to. But let him finish the cataloguing first. Ever write anything, Woburn?"

  "A few stories, Mr. Rainier. You read one of them—probably you've forgotten it—"

  "Ah yes, of course. The one about the unfortunate Russian?"

  Woburn nodded, and the somewhat mysterious reference was not explained. After coffee Mrs. Rainier said she was tired and would go to bed; Rainier mentioned letters he had to write; so there seemed nothing left for Woburn and me but to pass the evening together, somehow or other.

  Sheldon suggested the library, ushering us into the fine sombre room with a touch of evident pride, and obligingly switching on a radio in time for the news summary of a Hitler speech delivered in Berlin earlier that day. We listened awhile, then Woburn snapped off the machine with a gesture—the meagre residuum of protest to which modern man has been reduced. "I hope there isn't a war this year," he remarked, as one hoping the weather would stay fine. "You see, as soon as I finish this job I have another with the Kurtzmayers—they have a big collection at Nice and I daresay I shall spend all the autumn there—unless," he added with a half- smile, "Mr. Hitler's plans interfere with mine." I smiled back with a touch of the uncomfortableness that afflicts me when some facetious travel-film commentator refers to "Mr. and Mrs. Hippopotamus" and waits for the laugh. I was thinking of this, and also wondering how a youngster like Woburn (at least ten years my junior) had managed to establish this cataloguing racket amongst the rich and eminent, when he disarmingly told me all about it. "It was the Rainiers who gave me an introduction to the Kurtzmayers— they've been rather good at putting things in my way."

  I asked him how long he had known the Rainiers.

  "Only a few months. And you?"

  "About two years. I met him first—quite by accident—in a train."

  "I met him first in a public library."

  "By accident?"

  "No, I had a job there and he came to see me. Mrs. Rainier sent him."

  "MRS. Rainier?"

  "Yes, I met her before him. It was her idea I should do the Stourton job—that's why she sent him to see me."

  "I should have thought she'd have asked you to see him."

  "So should I, but it seems he had a queer idea he wanted to see me first without either of us knowing who the other was, so that if he didn't like me the whole thing could be dropped."

  "I see."

  "Haven't you ever noticed that for all his glib speech and ease of manner he's really shy of meeting new people—in a rather odd way?"

  I said perhaps I had, and asked him how his own meeting had happened.

  "He didn't have far to come—the library was only just across the river in Lambeth. Of course I took him for just an ordinary visitor. He first of all asked at the counter if we had any illustrated books on English villages. It's the sort of vague request you fairly often get from people, so I picked a few books off the shelves and left him at a table with them. Presently he handed them back with a few words of thanks, and out of politeness I then asked if he'd found what he'd been looking for. He said, well, no, not exactly—he'd just thought the pictures and photographs in some illustrated book might happen to include one of a place he'd once seen but had forgotten the name of. They hadn't though, and it didn't matter."

  "You must have thought it curious."

  "Yes, but the really curious thing was that I'd just written a short story based on a similar idea. He seemed quite interested when I told him this and we talked on for a while—then finally he stared round rather vaguely and said, 'I'm supposed to see a man who works here called Woburn.' I said I was Woburn and he pretended to be surprised and pleased, but somehow I felt he had known all the time, though his pleasure seemed genuine. He then said his wife had talked about me and thought I might do some cataloguing, and of course he had to say then who he was. I told him I'd be very glad, and he said that was fine, he'd let me know; then he shook hands hurriedly and left."

  "Did he let you know?"

  "Not immediately. After a few weeks I wrote to him, because I really wanted the job if I could get it—I was only earning three pounds a week. Of course I'd found out all about him in the interval—about his Fleet Street interests—that's really why I sent him that short story I'd written, because I thought maybe he'd pass it on to one of his editors." Woburn smiled. "He returned it a few days later, without comment, but said I could begin the cataloguing any time I liked."

  "Tell me about the story."

  "Oh, it was nothing much—just a rather feeble yarn about a Russian soldier returning from the front after the Revolution."

  "W
hat happened to him?"

  "Nothing exciting. He just roamed about the country trying to find where he lived."

  "Had he—had he lost his memory?"

  "No, he was just a simple fellow—couldn't read and write—all he could give was the name of the village and a description of it that might equally have applied to ten thousand other Russian villages. The government officials wouldn't bother with him, because he couldn't fill out the proper forms, so he just had to go on wandering vaguely about trying to find the place."

  "And did he—eventually?"

  "He was run over by a train and carried to a neighbouring village where he died without knowing that it actually was the one he'd been looking for . . . of course you might have guessed that."

  "Having read Gogol and Chekhov, I think I might."

  "I know, it was just an imitation. I haven't any real originality— only a technique. I suppose Rainier realized that. So I'd better stick to the catalogues."

  It seemed to me a courageous, but also a rather desolate thing for a young writer to admit.

  "Why not try the biography, if they give you the chance?"

  "I might, but I doubt if it would work out. You can't be sure they'd really WANT anyone to be impartial. That's why it's an affectation of Rainier's to run down his ancestors. A sort of inverted snobbery put on to impress people because the direct kind isn't fashionable anymore. . . . Mind you, I like him IMMENSELY."