Random Harvest Read Free

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 travelled 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-honoured 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 business-man 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