Read Online Nothing So Strange by James Hilton - Free Book Online Page A

of music afterwards. He learned to sing
“Schlafe Mein Prinzchen, Schlaf Ein,” which suited his voice very well.
    Then all at once he let go his work. With anyone else I wouldn’t have been
surprised, since he was leaving the College so soon and there couldn’t have
been much to finish up before the end of term. But he did it with such
abandon, and idleness didn’t fit in with his personality. I used to see him
wandering up and down Gower Street as if he had nowhere else to go; even
Mathews made a comment. Probably the waitress at the A.B.C. did also, for he
took to dropping in for coffee at unexpected times, and often lunched at
better places. All of which adds up to nothing at all except an idea that
grew in my mind and was never put into words.
    One morning towards the end of November my father announced that the great
Hugo Framm was on his way to London to receive some degree or deliver some
lecture, I forget which. “We’d better give a dinner for him. Good idea for
Brad to meet him first at our house.”
    My mother agreed it would be a good idea, but she lacked her usual
enthusiasm for party planning. “Give me a list of people to ask,” was all she
said.
    “Brad can help you. He’ll know a few professors and you can mix them up
with anyone else you like.” And he added, thoughtfully: “I don’t think it has
to be champagne.”
    “Oh God,” exclaimed my mother, “let’s have champagne even if it is only professors.”
    They tiffed about it in front of me in a way which was not only new in my
experience, but out of character for both of them—my father being the
last man to act the parsimonious host, and my mother not normally caring what
wines were drunk.
* * * * *
    I didn’t see Brad again till the party. If my mother saw
him she didn’t
tell me, not that it would have been a secret, but somehow we didn’t talk
about Brad much, and perhaps for that reason we talked a great deal about
Hugo Framm. My mother was no respecter of celebrities, and we shared the same
sense of humor, ribald and vagrant and often rather rude. Between us we built
up a huge joke about Professor Framm that made us both afraid we might laugh
indecently when the man actually took shape before our eyes. We first said he
would be fat and pompous, with a thick German accent and a mustache that
would get in the way of the soup; then we changed the picture because it
seemed too much the conventional Punch -cartoon-type of German
professor; we finally decided on a tall thin man more like Sherlock Holmes,
with the most exquisite manner and an Oxford accent. He would kiss my
mother’s hand and look up at her at the same time, which made her say she
wouldn’t shoot till she saw the whites of his eyes. I said he’d probably
engage in some scientific argument and shoot somebody else, or at least
demand a duel on Hampstead Heath. “Now that’s enough,” she laughed. “We’ll
never dare to meet him if we keep on….” We didn’t bother to ask my father
what the man was really like, and I suppose I could have found a photograph
of him somewhere if I’d wanted.
    It snowed a little the day of the party, just a white film over roofs and
lawns; the traffic soon scoured it from the streets. There were about twenty
people, and I wondered how Brad would like that, or if he cared any more. He
had suggested only a very few of the names. But my mother, or else
experience, had certainly done something to him socially; he was still shy,
but not awkwardly so, rather now as if he didn’t care whether he were shy or
not. On the whole it was a dull crowd, far too many people who were only
distinguished enough to be unsure whether others knew they were distinguished
at all. The man next to me had explored some buried cities in Honduras, and
my other neighbor was shortsighted and thought I was Lady Muriel Spencer,
whom he had been talking to over cocktails. Brad was between my mother and
the real