The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (10 page)

Long after Lisette and Hiram had ta
ken their bows and were
closeted in Papa Antoine's offic
e, and the next act was on, the
arena was still ringing to cries of Grognolle
!...
Grognolle
!...
We want Grognolle Come back, Grognolle!'

Much, much later, when the show was over, and the Cirque dark, Lisette and Hiram Holliday appeared at the stage door opening on to the boulevard. They were still in make-up and costume, except for coats thrown over their shoulders. The clown signalled to a passing taxi while the girl chattered angrily at the injustice of having to perform at a benefit when she was so tired. A few passers-by stopped to watch them. The cab drew up behind a car in which there sat a silent group of men. Hiram and the girl got into the cab.

'Club Scheherazade in the rue de Liege,' said Lisette, still grumbling, and the cab drove off. But after they had driven for five minutes, and made sure that there was no pursuit, the girl suddenly tapped the driver on the shoulder and gave him the address in the rue des Portes Blanches, where she lived. There they dismissed him and went inside together.

It was the next day when Lisette read and translated for him from a newspaper that he learned that, as Hiram Holliday, he was wanted by the French police to explain the presence in his hotel room of a gentleman with a broken neck, and that as Grognolle, he had become famous overnight. 'Lumiere,' the famous French commentator, had happened to be in the audience the night before, and had written two columns in
t
he Figaro
on the art of the clown, and particularly Grognolle, the new sensation at the Cirque Antoine.

And so Hiram Holliday was no more, and nightly, Grognolle packed them into the formerly half-empty Cirque Antoine until the inspector of buildings had to be bribed so that still more could be permitted to squeeze inside. Papa Antoine rubbed his hands at the shrewd bargain he had driven with Lisette's uncle. His talents, it is true, had been called to his attention in a rather queer manner, but since the silent man -it was indeed queer that he never spoke beyond nodding or shaking
his head, and always had his lit
tle niece present at conferences - was coining money for him, what then was the purpose of being too nosey?
Vive
Grognolle!

Hiram Holliday ceased to exist, even to himself, and in his stead there was Grognolle the silent clown. Those were unforgettable days and nights, but when in later days and years he remembered them, it was as though he was recalling and remembering something lovely and wonderful that had happened to someone else, a poignant story that he had read or heard with which in some way he had come to identify himself.

It was Grognolle and not Hiram Holliday who lived in the little flat in the rue des Portes Blanches, overlooking Paris, with Lisette the circus queen. He spoke only to her, and only when they were alone, because she insisted that for his safety he maintain the fiction that he never spoke, off-stage or on.

She looked after him and arranged a set of simple signals whereby when interviewers came he learned by watching her whether to shake his head in assent or negation. They had but the one performance at night - Le Grognolle now had to appear in both halves of the programme, and out of her ancient knowledge of the circus, her family having been circus people for six generations, she rounded out his performance, taught him new bits of business, developed his strange talent.

They kept house together, carefree like two children, rarely leaving the neighbourhood of the Montmartre, even when the hunt for Hiram Holliday seemed to have died down. They went together to the lovely little church of the Sacr6 Coeur, and the ancient one of Saint-Pierre-de-Montmartre on the site of an old Roman Temple to Mars, and in whose crypt, according to legend, Ignatius Loyola founded the order of Jesuits. Together they ranged across to the great Cimetiere du Nord where they stood before the grave of Heinrich Heine, and on other stones read the names of Berlioz, Offenbach, Renan, who wrote the
Life of Christ,
and Theophile Gautier. They did their shopping in a wonderful old market, a miniature replica of the ancient Halles, where all the vegetables were scrubbed and shining, and the autumn flowers turned the stands into solid banks of lovely pastel colours.

They lived resolutely in the wonderful, glamorous present, and battened their minds against the future, because of the knowledge of the truth that was locked in the heart of each, that some day the dream of the clown and the equestrienne must end, that they must go again their separate ways in the angry, bitter world that was so wrong, but from which somehow they had snatched together the few moments that were right. Only once, before the end, did Grognolle become Hiram. It was on a morning when he read a short item in the American paper, the
Paris Herald,
that Lisette had brought him. He read it and reread it, and was moody and silent for the day, and that night his performance lacked its usual life and sharpness. But the mood passed and he became the great Grognolle again, the sad, silent clown Parisians flocked to see, each hoping to be the recipient of the long, love-lorn stare which would send them into the maddest peals of laughter.

And Grognolle he remained, to all, to Lisette, to himself, until the storm burst from overseas, the storm for which the person who had been Hiram Holliday was waiting.

How Paris Laughed at Hiram Holliday for the Last Time

The
New York Sentinel
began the publication and expose of the great Vinovarieff plot, documented and authenticated, the story of a group of White Russians who had sold out to the Nazis in a plot against their own fatherland, as well as against France, the country that had adopted and sheltered them. It was a clear, well-worked-out scheme to foment trouble in the Ukraine, and provide for Germany the opportunity to carve out her huge slice of the rich granary. It gave the murder list of the plotters - Mikoff, the man already stabbed to death, and others marked for liquidation to advance the scheme, Soviet diplomats, loyal White Russians, even French officials, and named the men from the German Embassy involved in the plot. It named the trigger man of the syndicate, Sujureff. He was, Hiram suspected, when Lisette translated the tremendous scare
heads and stories from the French papers, the man whose neck he had broken so many ages ago in his little hotel room.

The story set Paris and half Europe on fire. And Hiram was glad to note that in accordance with the warning he had sent with the papers, Beauheld, his managing editor, had not involved him.

The exposure drove the French police and secret service into a tornado of energy. One link was needed to complete the tale - General Grigor Vinovarieff, the leader in the plot. And for the first time Hiram realized that the finding of General Vinovarieff was of vital importance to himself. Because in his hands lay the identification of Sujureff, the man who had been sent to murder Hiram Holliday.

He had now become two men again, Hiram Holliday by day, Grognolle at night. Lisette saw and understood. Was the idyll drawing to a close ? There was no surface change in her, but that was because she was a Frenchwoman and a performer with a tradition.

In
his daytime hours Hiram hatched a hundred wild imaginings of how he would find the missing man, all of them impossible, he knew, because a French paper had wondered whether there was any connexion between the plot, the missing American, the dead, unidentified Russian in his rooms, and the curious story told by a certain language professor. The hunt for Hiram Holliday was on again. He took to keeping to his room by day. At night, muffled, he drove with Lisette to the Cirque Antoine and was safe as Le Grognolle who never spoke, but only made people laugh until they cried.

But how safe ?

It was on a Saturday night that the police suddenly invaded the Cirque Antoine.

The little Cirque was packed to the last available inch. People sat in the aisles, and stood jammed up under the roof. Remi Ventura and his talking parrot Coco held the arena when Papa Antoine, pale and perspiring, burst into the dressing-room where Hiram and Lisette had just finished dressing and making up.

'Bon Dieu
!
' he cried.
'Mes enfants. Les flics
...
detectives
...
the police. They have come. They are here. Everywhere. All of the performers must line up for inspection. They wish to see all
..
all....'
He paused for a moment and then looked at them cunningly. He had suddenly remembered the circumstances under which Le Grognolle had come to him.
'Mes chers enfants’
he
said....
'Is
...
is there anything you wish to tell Papa Antoine before it is too late ?'

Hiram's stomach turned over. He had understood the word police. But what it was about, Lisette could not translate for him in front of Papa Antoine. A man with a moustache stuck his head inside the door and cried:
'Allons, allons
, vite!
Come out
...
come out!'

They filed out of the dressing-room. All of the performers in the show except the man in the arena who could be examined later were lined up in the space before the bar. Hiram and Lisette walked slowly to the end of the line by the Cossack act, and Hiram stood next to the bearded giant, with Lisette on his right, the last one. She herself had placed herself thus so that she could whisper in his ear that the police were there, and that detectives and secret service agents had commanded the lineup of performers, that there was no escape, that it was the end.

There were many gendarmes about. From the arena behind the curtain came the absurd voice of the parrot, singing a chansonette with his master. And three men in plain clothes began a slow march up the line-up of performers, pausing to gaze at each one. The leader was a little man with keen eyes behind gold spectacles.

All time and thought had stopped for Hiram Holliday. Somehow they had discovered, or had had a
tip...
.They would reach the end of the li
ne. There would be a tap on his
shoulder No one would believe his fantastic story. He
could feel himself sweating beneath his thick make-up. Now the men had reached the centre of the line, passed it, moved slowly on, they were passing the riding Cossacks.... In a moment they would reach
him....

It was Lisette whose nerve br
oke. With a half-cry, half-sob,
she threw her arms aroun
d Hiram's neck: 'No! No, no! My
Hira
m. I will not let them take you.
Oh, Hiram, Hiram....'

But curiously, the three men seemed to pay no attention to her outburst. They had stopped in front of the giant Cossack ring-master and the little man with the gold-rimmed eyeglasses was looking at them curiously. Then with a movement that was too quick for the eye, he suddenly knocked off his hat and twitched away his big and bushy black beard.
' Eh bien
!
he said, or rather began
:'
General Grigor Vino
varieff,
I...'

He never finished it. The
Russian leaped back with a roar
like a bull and a gun flashed i
n his hand. It exploded, but it
was Hiram who had knocked his arm up. It exploded
again, but
this time it was aimed at hi
mself, and slowly, the huge man
folded to the ground where he
lay a heap of crumpled, gaudy cl
othing, while in the pa
ndemonium Hiram Holliday struck
himself on the forehead and cri
ed: 'Fool! Fool! Will you never
learn? Fool! Complacency!
To think that you would be the
only one taking sanctuary in a circus! The seventh Cossack!
He was there all the time for y
ou to see. And now the only man
who can clear you is dead. H
iram Holliday, the great adven
turer Idiot!
Fool!...'

The little detective had taken a quick hand to restoring order.

‘Vite! Vite!
'
he cried.
'Attention
!
There must be no disorder. No one must know. Go on, go on!' Ventura and his parrot had just made an exit. 'Oh! Go on! Here you, Grognolle! Go out there quickly and make them laugh...

Hiram Holliday felt himself pushed and hustled through the curtain and out into the pool of white lights and thousands of shining eyes that was the arena. He was greeted with a wild burst of applause, and a great shout of laughter, laughter that sounded to Hiram more mocking and bitter than anything he had ever in his life heard before.

But that night, in their home, it was Lisette who faced him bravely and clear-eyed and told him that he must leave Paris.