The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (2 page)

The buyer followed the direction indicated and saw standing at a window, too, Hiram Holliday, or rather, since she did not know his name, her casual last-day shipboard acquaintance. He was a little stouter, if anything, in a loose-fitting overcoat, and he wore a Fedora hat and carried an umbrella crooked over his arm, because, as always at Southampton, it was raining. He was gazing far out over the grey expanse of docks and the spare forests of masts and funnels.

* There,' said the buyer, 'is the most romantic man I ever met in my life. He was born five hundred years too late. I wonder what will become of him.' She sighed because of the thing Holliday had stirred in her that she did not understand.

Her sister's laugh tinkled like breaking glass against the deep bay of the
Britannique's
siren announcing that the voyage was over. 'You're getting dotty in your old age, sis.'

The buyer looked towards the man again, but he was gone.

Who Hiram Holliday Was

All men, more or less, lead double lives. They are as they know themselves to be, and also as their friends and associates see them and know them.
Whether the line of divergence
between the two existences is narrow, or wide, depends largely upon the knowledge and judegment of others and their opportunities for observation.

The lives of the insignificant-looking man marching down the drab Customs shed in Southampton to claim a modest allowance of baggage under the initial 'H', were as far apart as the two continents, and yet they had their curiously interlocking features.

What the testimony of certain passengers of the
Britan
nique
would have been with regard to Hiram Holliday has already been seen. And if you had asked a man by the name of Joel Smith, head of the copy-desk of the
New York Sentinel,
and who plays no further part in these stories, about Hiram Holliday, he would have said: 'Who, old Holliday ?' (The 'old' was in itself revealing, because Holliday was not yet quite thirty-nine, it was just that he had been with the
Sentinel
so long.) 'Best copy-reader we ever had. But he's a stick-in-the-mud. He'll never be anything else. If you cut him, he'd bleed commas and semi-colons.'

Obviously there is a considerable gap. And this is how Hiram Holliday bridged it.

For fifteen years Holliday sat on the rim of the
Sentinel
copy-desk, correcting copy, writing headlines and checking up the work of men of action, the reporters and correspondents and feature-writers who went out into the world and got the news. The world passed beneath his fingers in the shape of words, typewritten on grey copy-paper, murder in a cheap Third Avenue rooming house, bombs raising clouds of tawny dust on the Abyssinian plain, an acid review of a new play, rolling floods that washed away lives and property, love on Park Avenue, love in Greenwich village, fire, tornado, war, exploration, heroism, such as it was, and Hiram had no illusions left, treachery, politics, national and foreign, arson, theft, rape and philanthropy, all of them were tossed at him sooner or later during the day or week by the man in the slot, during his eight-hour trick.

The
Sentinel
was a morning paper and Holliday's normal shift was from three in the afternoon until eleven at night, with Sunday off, or perhaps a weekday, but he had done all the other tricks, the one from eight to four in the morning, and the lobster shift from midnight to morn. He was never late for work, and no one remembered him ever being ill. He appeared, removed his coat, opened his vest, pulled down his tie and opened his short collar, placed a half-dozen well-sharpened copy pencils and two fresh packs of cigarettes before him and waited.

When a story was floated at him by his chief he read it through, his mind forming the images of near or faraway places and things and happenings. He read it for libel, punch and clarity, he corrected errors. He brought up the point in a pithy headline, he initialled it, and floated it back to the head copy-reader. His lunch hour he spent in a nearby restaurant. He lived in two rooms in the village. When his time was up he donned his hat and coat and went away. And of what he did outside the office, or even of what he thought while he was there, no single soul on the huge paper had even the vaguest idea.

As far as his colleagues knew, he never went anywhere, never did anything, never saw anything, never joined in their activities, had no friends. He was liked by his chief and fellow copy-readers because he was pleasant, polite, willing and frequently showed flashes of biting, amusing humour. They didn't even know where he spent his vacations, or when the five-day week came in, his two consecutive days off. The only thing they did know was that for the past three or four years Hiram Holliday had been saving vacation time and money for a trip to Europe. Holliday had been forced by family circumstances to leave college in his third year. By the time his family obligations were lifted and he was free and alone in the world, he had been eight years at the desk. His ways were set. He had never married.

What no one knew was that outside office hours Hiram Holliday was a gentleman adventurer; that laboriously, with infinite pains and patience, he had in his later years acquired all of the outward attributes of the romantic hero. The inner ones he had always possessed. They were his inescapable antidote to the bitterness, the cruelty, the disillusionment, the harshness and ridiculousness of the world that is known to the newspaperman, the world in which there are no heroes, chivalry is dead, and the good deed is figured strictly on the percentage basis. The more idols that crumbled beneath the lead of his copy pencil, the more he learned of greed, selfishness and human rapacity, the more he yearned for selfless heroism, honesty and gallantry, the quest of beauty for beauty's sake, the love of humanity for its frailty, the cult of decency, the aura of fearlessness. The world was the most wonderfully exciting thing that had ever happened, the fantastic spinning ball that he was allowed to inhabit for his span of years, and his reading was devoted to devouring its history. He knew that if he could ever reach those far-off places where history had been made that the very stones and objects that had felt the touch of the people of the past would tell him things, would help to slake his great thirst to be one with, to understand this world which heretofore practically had existed for him only through the eyes of others.

He had known for many years of his extraordinary sensitivity to objects that had been in close connexion with people. It was simply a sensitivity magnified to a high degree, the same thing that enables a house-hunting person to walk into a dwelling for sale, or for rent, and say: 'This feels like a happy house. Let's stay here.' Hiram Holliday's life was a constant straining to co-ordinate and visualize the impressions of others. He had the true copy-reader's contempt for the careless or incomplete reporter, but in addition he actually suffered mental agonies at the lack of human insight in the stories he read, in the failure of this or that reporter to include the one touch that would make the event understandable to all. It was as if he had been given a book in which was all the information about the world in which he lived, only to find when he went to it for instruction or relief that half the pages were missing.

His physical attributes were even more amazing. He was, as has been said, a gentleman adventurer who would never go adventuring, but who played at it, instead, and let the play serve as an anodyne for his imagination, his longing and the dullness of a vocation into which he had been trapped by circumstances.

He learned to do the things that make men men, many old things they had had to do to survive, before the days when it was all done for them, and new things too. He went to fencing
salle
and shooting school and took lessons in foil,
epee
and sabre, pistol and rifle. He never forgot the thrill when his pistol instructor had told him: 'The first thing, if you've got to get into a gun fight, is to gain twenty-five yards. The average man with a pistol in his hand at twenty-five yards might just as well be holding a rock.' The very language enchanted him.

Because of starting late in life, and his physical attributes, he could become a champion at none of these things, but he learned to do them well enough to satisfy his own longings. Laboriously, an hour a week, because it was all he could afford, he mastered the art of flying a plane. He joined the National Guard and drilled once a week. He went to a gymnasium and learned to box, and even acquired a smattering of ju-jitsu. These were the escapes, practised in his time away from the paper which gave him the zest for living. When he faced an opponent steel in hand in the fencing
salle,
he was D'Artagnan at bay. Of these things no one ever knew. It was unto himself sufficient that he was a man and unafraid. It was here that Hiram Holliday and the average dreamer parted company. Imaginings satisfy the average amongst us. We can see ourselves performing romantic and dramatic deeds, and it suffices even though we know we cannot run a block without puffing and that in a hand-to-hand encounter of any kind we would not last two minutes. It amused Hiram Holliday to be able to put his dreams into practice. But he had never saved anyone's life, fired a shot at anything but a target, or raised his hand in anger against a fellow-man. His protective colouration was against him, his roundish face, his ruffled, sandy hair, his steel-rimmed spectacles, his slight tendency to corpulency and his bland manner. The thing was that people never looked at him twice. If they had they might have noticed something besides the stubborn chin, the firm mouth and the eager, bright blue eyes. A man does not learn to shoot, fence, ride a horse, swim, box and wrestle and fly a plane, even badly, without its leaving a mark on him.

It was rather indicative of Hiram's life up to that point that his opportunity to fulfil his life's dream and visit Europe should have come about by virtue of a comma - eventually known as the $500,000 comma.

The
Sentinel
won a particularly nasty and dangerous half-million-dollar libel suit by virtue of the placement of a comma in the story in question. To have lost it would have cost the paper at least a hundred thousand dollars.

When the original copy was exhumed and examined after the trial, it was found that no comma had existed there when the story first arrived at the copy desk, but that a large, fat, and pointed one had been inserted with a firm stroke of the pencil by the hand of Hiram Holliday.

A grateful publisher, mellifluous under a victory that had saved him money and prestige, and willing once and for all to drive home to copy-readers past, present and future, the importance of well-placed commas, awarded Hiram Holliday a bonus of $1,000 and a month's vacation with pay. That, with the money he had saved out of his head-line prizes and the time he had coming to him, brought Hiram his trip. He sailed the next week on the
Britannique.

Hitler was storming at Nuremberg, the French Government was tottering under strikes; the Russian bear was muttering to itself. Sudeten Germans were firing at Czech Customs guards and the Czech Government, too late, was offering concessions to the Sudetens. In England there was a quickening of something called A.R.P., and people actually began inquiring about getting gas masks. The poker-players in Downing Street squeezed their cards - behind them were out-of-date aeroplanes, insufficient aeroplanes, and anti-aircraft guns that had fought
the last war, and an unprepared, ill-equipped army - and scratched the chins of lengthening and sallowing faces, faces lined with worry. They were having to decide as they had decided once before that if you are going to call a pat hand that you think is a bluff you really ought to have better than a pair of sixes yourself.

With mixed emotions Hiram Holliday went ashore at Southampton, boarded the boat special for London and was shunted down the vast dock, through Southampton streets, out into rural England under rain, and headed for grey, sprawling London town. His race had been cradled in England. He was there.

What Hiram Holliday Saw in London

The sulphurous black war clouds were piling on the horizon, but at first they remained unnoticed by Holliday because he was ranging London like a hound.

He drank in the city with his eyes and his ears, he took in the unforgettable scent of London into his blood through his nostrils, he soaked in the feel of the old, old city through his finger-tips and the pores of his skin. He was feverish with the turmoil of the millions of voices that called to him from every crooked street and bowed window.

He left the smart West End with its glittering shops and crested windows and walked down the grey, dusty alleys of the back streets. He walked through the City and rubbed elbows with the clerks and bank runners in their shiny silk hats. He wandered through the musty Law Courts, down Chancery Lane, and through Temple Bar, and felt, as he passed, all the weight of the machinery of British justice on his shoulders.

He went down to the Pool on the Thames and stood amongst the rusty ships and breathed in the heavy odours of tea and coffee and a hundred spices and read the exciting names on the bows of the vessels. He walked through Limehouse down where the grey river bent itself into Limehouse Reach and drank mild and bitter in the wonderfully redolent pubs. The first night he climbed to the top of Hampstead Heath,' 'appy 'Ampstead,' that he had read about and sat with the billion beckoning lights of London at his feet and listened to the distant surf-roar of the city, and then walked for hours through quiet streets past the two-storied red-brick houses, and let his imagination play on what lay behind the shaded windows.