Random Harvest Read Free Page B

of us met once a week to talk our heads off—we called ourselves the Heretics, but I can’t remember anything said at those meetings half so well as I can remember the smell of fish coming up from the shop below.  And J. M. Keynes was lecturing in the Art School, politely suggesting that Germany mightn’t be able to pay off so many millions in reparations, or was it billions?--in those days one just thought of a number and stuck as many naughts as one fancied after it.  And there were Holland Rose on Napoleon and Pigou on Diminishing Returns, and Bury still explaining the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one evening Pal and I—sounds sentimental, doesn’t it, Pal and I?--lined up in a queue that stretched half-way round Trinity Great Court to hear a lecture by a fellow named Eddington about some new German fellow named Einstein who had a theory about light bending in the middle—that brought the house down, of course—roars of laughter—just as you heard tonight only more so—good clean undergraduate fun at its best.  And behind us on the wall the portrait of Catholic Mary scowled down on this modern audience that scoffed at science no less than at religion.  Heretics indeed—and laughing heretics!  But my pal Pal didn’t laugh—he was transfixed with a sort of ecstasy about the whole thing.
    “I did a good deal of reading on the river, and also at the Orchard at Grantchester—you remember Rupert Brooke’s poem?  Brooke would be fifty today, if he’d lived—think of that. . . .  Still stands the clock at ten to three, but Rupert Brooke is late for tea— confined to his bed with rheumatism or something—that’s what poets get for not dying young.  The woman at the Orchard who served the teas remembered Brooke—she was a grand old chatterbox and once I got to know her she’d talk endlessly about undergraduates and professors past and present—many a yarn, I daresay, that I’ve forgotten since and that nobody else remembered even then. . . .  Trivial talk—just as trivial as the way I’m talking to you now.  Nineteen-twenty, that was—Cambridge full of demobilized old-young men still wearing dyed officers’ overcoats—British warms sent up to Perth and returned chocolate-brown—full of men still apt to go suddenly berserk in the middle of a rag and turn it into a riot, or start whimpering during a thunderstorm—after-effects of shell-shock, you know.  Plenty of us had had that—including myself.”
    “As a result of the head injury you mentioned yesterday?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “You had a pretty bad time?”
    “No, I was one of the lucky ones—comparatively, that is.  But when you’re blown up, even if you’re not physically smashed to bits . . .”  He broke off awkwardly.  “I’m sorry.  It isn’t Armistice Day any more.  These confessions are out of place.”
    “Not at all.  I’m interested.  It’s so hard for my generation to imagine what it was like.”
    “Don’t worry—you’ll learn soon enough.”
    “How long was it before you were rescued?”
    “Haven’t the faintest idea.  I suppose I was unconscious.”
    “But you must have recovered consciousness later?”
    “Presumably.  I don’t remember when or where or any of the details.
    But I’ve some reason to believe I was taken prisoner.”
    “Reason to believe?  That’s a guarded way of putting it.”
    “I know—but it happens to be just about all I can say.  You see, I literally don’t remember.  From that moment of being knocked out my memory’s a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool.”
    “YEARS later?”
    “Getting on for three years, but of course I didn’t know that at first.  And it was a wet day, as luck would have it.”  He smiled.  “You don’t find my story very plausible?”
    “I might if you’d tell me the whole of it—without gaps.”
    “But there ARE gaps—that’s just the trouble.”
    “What were you