Free Random Harvest by James Hilton Page A

own possessive way.  Perhaps a less loving and more thoughtful husband would have sent her to a warmer climate during the winters, but my father wasn’t thoughtful—at best his thoughtlessness became comradely, as when he insisted on taking her for brisk walks over the hills on January days.  It was a cherished saying of his that fresh air would blow the cobwebs out of your lungs.  It also blew the life out of my mother’s lungs, for it was after one of those terrible walks, during which she gasped and panted while my father shouted Whitmanesque encouragement, that she called in Sanderstead, our local doctor, who diagnosed t.b.  My father was appalled from that moment and spent a small fortune on all kinds of cures, but it was too late—she died within the year, and my father, I have since felt, promptly did something about her in his mind that corresponded to winding up or writing off or some other operation that happens even in the best financial circles.”
    He suddenly stood up and moved to the open window, staring out as if facing something that challenged him.  “Those are the hills where he made her walk.  You can see the line of them against the sky.”  Then he turned abruptly and said he was sure I was tired and would want to go to bed.
    I assured him I wasn’t sleepy at all.
    “But you came in yawning.”
    “Maybe, but I’m wide-awake now.  The breeze is so fresh . . .  You must have hated your father.”
    He answered slowly:  “Yes, I suppose I did.  Freud would say so, anyhow.  But of course when I was a boy and even up to my undergraduate days people only admitted the politer emotions.”
    “The war changed all that.”
    “Yes, indeed, and so many other things too.”
    He was silent for a moment; then I went on:  “You once told me about a certain day, sometime after the war ended, when you found yourself on a park seat in Liverpool.”
    “When did I tell you that?”  He controlled a momentary alarm, then added with a smile:  “Ah yes, I remember—in your rooms at St.  Swithin’s.  I’m always garrulous after public speeches. . . .  Well, if I told you, you know.  That’s how it was.  And don’t ask me about anything BEFORE the park seat because I can’t answer.”
    “But how about AFTER the park seat?”
    He seemed relieved.  “AFTER?  Oh I can stand any amount of cross-examination there—I’m on safe ground from about noon on December 27, 1919.”
    “I wish you’d begin your story there, then, and bring it up to date.”
    “But there IS no story—except my life story.”
    “That’s what I’d like to hear.”
    “How I Made Good?  From Park Seat to Parliament?”
    “If you like to call it that.”
    He laughed.  “It’s mostly a lot of sordid business details and family squabbles.  You don’t know the family, either.”
    “All the same, I wish you’d tell me.  The effort of setting it all out might even help you towards the other memory—if you’re still anxious for it.”
    I could see the response to that in his eyes as he entered the light again.
    “So you really think memory’s like an athlete—keep it in training— take it for cross-country runs?  H’m, might be something in the idea.  When do we start?”
    “Now, if you’re not too sleepy.  I’m not. . . .  Go back to that park seat in Liverpool.”
    “But I told you about that once.”
    “Tell me again.  And then go on.”
    So he began, and as it makes a fairly long story, it goes better in the third person.
     
     
    PART TWO
     
    He found himself lying on that park seat.  He had opened his eyes to see clouds and drenched trees, and to feel the drops splashing on his face.  After a while his position began to seem more and more odd, so he raised himself to a sitting angle, and was immediately aware of sodden clothes, stiff limbs, a terrific headache, and a man stooping over him.  His first thought was that he must have been drunk the night before, but he soon rejected it,