Free Random Harvest by James Hilton Page B

partly because he could not remember the night before at all, partly because he somehow did not think he was the sort of young man to have had that sort of night, but chiefly because of a growing interest in what the man stooping over him was saying.  It was a kind of muttered chorus—“That’s right, mister—take it easy.  Didn’t ‘ardly touch yer—it was the wet roadway, you sort o’ slipped.  Cheer up, mister, no bones broke—you’ll be all right— wouldn’t leave you ‘ere, I wouldn’t, if I didn’t know you’d be all right. . . .”
    Presently, suggested by the muttered chorus and supported by the fact that his clothes were not only sopping wet but also muddied and torn, another hypothesis occurred to him—that he had been run down by a car whose driver had brought him into the park and was now leaving him there.
    But WHERE?  His brain refused an answer, and when pressed offered a jumble of memories connected only with war—shell-fire for headaches, a smashed leg for stiffness, no-man’s-land for all the mud and rain in the world.
    He stood up, feeling dizzy, swayed and almost fell.  The man had gone, was now nowhere to be seen.  Then he noticed he had been lying down on sheets of newspaper.  He stooped to peel one off the seat, hoping it might afford some clue, but the top of the page that would have contained a name and date was an unreadable mush, and the rest was rapidly softening under the heavy rain.  He peered at it, nevertheless, searching for some helpful word or phrase before the final disintegration.  Most of the letterpress seemed to be news about floods and flood damage—rescues from swollen rivers, people stranded in upper floors, rowboats in streets, and so on.
    Then suddenly his eyes caught a paragraph headed “Rainier Still in Germany”—one of those mock-cheerful items that tired sub-editors put in to fill an odd corner—something about soaked holiday crowds taking comfort from the thought that somebody somewhere was faring even worse.
    Now it is curious how one’s own name, or the name of one’s home, or a word like “cancer,” will sometimes leap out of a page as if it were printed in red ink.  It was like that for the young man as he staggered through the deserted park towards a gate he could see in the distance.  Rainier Still in Germany—Rainier Still in Germany.  It was a challenge, something he had to answer; and the answer came.  “IMPOSSIBLE—I’m HERE, reading a newspaper, and the newspaper’s in English—therefore this can’t be Germany.”
    Presently he passed through the park gate into a busy thoroughfare.  A tram came along, mud-splashed to its upper windows and sluicing swathes of water from the rails to the gutters.  It was difficult to see through the spray of mud and rain, but on the side of the tram as it passed by he could just read the inscription—“Liverpool City Corporation.”
    He walked along by the high railings till the park came to an end and shops began.  Meanwhile he had been feeling in his pockets, finding money—coins and several treasury notes, amounting in all to over four pounds.  Reaching a newsagent’s shop he went inside and asked for a paper.
    “Post or Courier, sir?”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    A paper was handed over.  “Looks like you’ve had a fall, sir?  Terribly slippery after all this rain. . . .  Like me to give you a bit of a brush?”
    “Er . . . thanks.”
    “Why, you’re wet through—if I was you I’d get home and to bed as quick as I could.  Like me to get you a cab?”
    “No, that wouldn’t help.  I don’t live here.  But if there’s a
    tailor nearabouts—“
    “Two doors ahead, sir.  He’ll fix you up.  Say I sent you.”
    “Thanks.”
    He walked out, glancing at the paper as he did so.  He saw that the date was December 27, 1919.
    So now he knew three important things:  Who, Where, and When.
     
     
    Two hours later Charles Rainier was in a train to London.  He had