“Now, what must one deduce from that?” He paused to look across the table at his guest, left eyebrow raised.
“That you are even better informed than I thought,” Cohn said, without encouragement. “If I were your patient your enquiries might be justified, but as I am not, and have not the least intention of consulting you professionally, I regard them as intrusive, and possibly unethical.”
If he had expected his host to be put out he was disappointed. The doctor continued to regard him with interested detachment.
“I’m not yet entirely convinced that you ought not to be someone’s patient,” he remarked. “However, let me tell you why it was I, rather than another Harshom, who was led to make these enquiries. Perhaps you may then think them less impertinent. But I am going to preface that with a warning against false hopes. You must understand that the Ottilie Harshom you are seeking does not exist and has not existed. That is quite definite.
“Nevertheless, there is one aspect of this matter which puzzled me greatly, and that I cannot bring myself to dismiss as coincidence. You see, the name Ottilie Harshom was not entirely unknown to me. No” He raised his hand. “I repeat, no false hopes. There is no Ottilie Harshom, but there has been or, rather, there have in the past been, two Ottilie Harshoms.”
Cohn Trafford’s resentful manner had entirely dropped away. He sat, leaning a little forward, watching his host intently.
“But,” the doctor emphasised, “It was all long ago. The first was my grandmother. She was born in 1832, married Grandfather Harshom in 1861, and died in 1866. The other was my sister: she, poor little thing, was born in 1884 and died in 1890…”
He paused again. Cohn made no comment. He went on: “I am the only survivor of this branch so it is not altogether surprising that the others have forgotten there was ever such a name in the family, but when I heard of your enquiries I said to myself: There is something out of order here. Ottilie is not the rarest of names, but on any scale of popularity it would come a very long way down indeed; and Harshom is a rare name. The odds against these two being coupled by mere chance must be some quite astronomical figure. Something so large that I can not believe it is chance. Somewhere there must be a link, some cause…
“So, I set out to discover if I could find out why this young man Trafford should have hit upon this improbable conjunction of names and, seemingly, become obsessed by it. You would not care to help me at this point?”
Cohn continued to look at him, but said nothing.
“No? Very well. When I had all the available data assembled the conclusion I had to draw was this: that as a result of your accident you underwent some kind of traumatic experience, an experience of considerable intensity as well as unusual quality. Its intensity one deduces from your subsequent fixation of purpose; the unusual quality partly from the pronounced state of confusion in which you regained consciousness, and partly from the consistency with which you deny recollecting anything from the moment of the accident until you awoke.
“Now, if that were indeed a blank, why did you awake in such a confused condition? There must have been some recollection to cause it. And if there was something akin to ordinary dream images, why this refusal to speak of them? There must have been, therefore, some experience of great personal significance wherein the name Ottilie Harshom was a very potent element indeed.
“Well, Mr. Trafford. Is the reasoning good, the conclusion valid? Let me suggest, as a physician, that such things are a burden that should be shared.”
Cohn considered for some little time, but when he still did not speak the doctor added: “You are almost at the end of the road, you know. Only two more Rarshoms on the list, and I assure you they won’t be able to help so what then?” Cohn said, in a fiat voice: “I expect you are right. You should know. All the same, I must see them. There might be something, some clue I can’t neglect the least possibility… I had just a little hope when you invited me here. I knew that you had a family…”
“I had,” the doctor said, quietly. “My son Malcolm was killed racing at Brooklands in 1927. He was unmarried. My daughter married, but she had no children. She was killed in a raid on London in 1941… So there it ends..” He shook his head slowly.
“I am sorry,” said Cohn. Then: “Have you a picture of your daughter that I may see?”
She wasn’t of the generation you are looking for.”
“I realise that, but nevertheless..
“Very well, when we return to the study. Meanwhile, you’ve not yet said what you think of my reasoning.”
“Oh, it was good.”
“But you are still disinclined to talk about it? Well, I am not. And I can still go a little further. Now, this experience of yours cannot have been of a kind to cause a feeling of shame or disgust, or you would be trying to sublimate it in some way, which manifestly you are not. Therefore it is highly probable that the cause of your silence is fear. Something makes you afraid to discuss the experience. You are not, I am satisfied, afraid of facing it; therefore your fear must be of the consequences of communicating it. Consequences possibly to someone else, but much more probably to yourself…”
Cohn went on regarding him expressionlessly for a moment. Then he relaxed a little and leaned back in his chair. For the first time he smiled faintly.
“You do get there, in the end, don’t you, Doctor? But do you mind if I say that you make quite Germanically heavygoing of it? And the whole thing is so simple, really. It boils down to this. If a man, any man, claims to have had an experience which is outside all normal experience, it will be inferred, will it not, that he is in some way not quite a normal man? In that case, he cannot be entirely relied upon to react to a particular situation as a normal man should and if his reactions may be no normal, how can he be really dependable? He may be, of course but would it not be sounder policy to put authority into the hands of a man about whom there is no doubt? Better to be on the safe side. So he is passed over. His failure to make the expected step is not unnoticed. A small cloud, a mere wrack, of doubt and risk begins to gather above him. It is tenuous, too insubstantial for him to disperse, yet it casts a faint, persistent shadow.
“There is, I imagine, no such thing as a normal human being, but there is a widespread feeling that there ought to be. Any organisation has a conception of “the type of man we want here,” which is regarded as the normal for its purposes. So every man there attempts more or less to accord to it organisational man, in fact and anyone who diverges more than slightly from the type in either his public, or in his private, life does so to the peril of his career. There is, as you said, fear of the resuTr cc my self: it is, as I said, so simple.”
“True enough,” the doctor agreed. But you have not taken any care to disguise the consequence of the experience the hunt for Ottilie Harshom.”
“I don’t need to. Could anything be more reassuringly normal than “man seeks girl?” I have invented a background which has quite satisfied any interested friends and even several Harshoms.”
“I dare say. None of them being aware of the “coincidence” in the conjunction of “Ottilie” with “Harshom.” But I am.”
He waited for Cohn Trafford to make some comment on that. When none came, he went on: “Look, my boy. You have this business very heavily on your mind. There are only the two of us here. I have no links whatever with your firm. My profession should be enough safeguard for your confidence, but I will undertake a special guarantee if you like. It will do you good to unburden and I should like to get to the bottom of this…”