The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (3 page)

He learned the Strand and Fleet Street with its wonderful, intriguing old courtyards to be gained through narrow, grimy alleys, and tasted the tang and excitement of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. He sought out names that he knew, Padding-ton and Waterloo Stations, and went and stood there and smelled the English soft coal smell and read the names on the train boards - Torquay, Paignton, Plymouth, Land's End, Brighton, Harwich, Paris.'...

Westminster Abbey, that fantastic jumble of the bones and relics of England's great, that charnel house of history, was almost unbearable to Holliday because of the sensations of ancient times that fought for possession of his body and his mind. He felt like a
switchboard through which a mill
ion calls were thronging, but he could hardly tear himself away from the walks and old flagstones of the Tower of London because there he walked with a breed of men and women that somehow he felt had passed from the earth, and who still, he knew, were in their feelings and ambitions as of the people of his day.

The tiny tower that housed the globules of coloured light known as the Crown Jewels frightened him because of the passion and greed he felt draping the collection like a mantle, but he stayed for hours in the armoury of old weapons and let his fingers wander over the ashen shafts of ancient tilting spears and closed his hand over the pommels of the great two-handed swords, and felt the tough, truculent presence of the great, tawny men of centuries past who had had the strength and the will to swing them. He heard old cries and lamentations in the dungeons and once he passed through a zone of terror, and found that he was at the place where a girl named Jane Grey, Queen of England for but a few days, had waited to be killed.

One clear day, on an impulse, he drove out to Croydon and paid three pounds to a pilot to fly him over London. His fingers itched to be at the wheel, but he said nothing, and feasted his eyes on the illimitable meadows of grey stone, the threading grey worm that was the Thames and the green patches of the great parks. He saw the city below him built upon the mortar of centuries, a cement mixed of dust and blood, and knew that as all things pass, so this city must some day bleed and die again.

He thought, too, for the first time of bombers, and the coming threat of war, and looking down, he frowned a little and shook his round head, because he knew that while many might die or be mangled, and that much could be destroyed, it did not yet lay within the power of man to obliterate at one blow so vast a city.

There is something about flying that changes one's aspects. Literally, one gets off the earth, though still cloaked by its atmosphere. When he returned to the earth and London he was aware for the first time that fear was coming to the city. He saw it written on the faces of the people, but more, he felt it through his sensitive nerves.

He dined variously, in places high and low, at Quaglino's, at Frascati, at a little Italian restaurant in Soho, in an old pub off Curzon Street, at the Victor Hugo, at Simpson's, and at the Berkeley Grill, and the noisy Lyons Corner Houses. And it seemed that each time the clatter of dishes and voices had risen a note higher, and faces were paler and nerves more tightly strung.

Jonas, one of the men in the London office of the
Sentinel,
took him to the Monte Carlo Club one three o'clock in the morning, and Holliday, looking more neutral and insignificant than ever in a dinner jacket, sat in the close reek of food and perfume and bodies, in the long, narrow, red-furnished bottle-party club, and thought that he smelled fear the way a growling dog scents that a man is afraid of him.

A fat, red-faced man as squat and obese as a Texas toad sat at a table with his arms around two lovely girls. One had flame-coloured hair, and the other brown, with the fashionable streak of white dyed through it. Because the table cut them off, they seemed to Holliday to be naked except for coloured bits of silk across their pointed breasts.

'Who is that man ?' Holliday asked.

Jonas looked. 'That's Lord Dregnath,' he replied. 'One of the richest men in England. Owns the
Gazette
among other things.'

'Lord
...
lord
...'
ran through Holliday's head. 'Master of men
...
giver of gifts
...
protector of the poor.'

A young fop was dragged past their table by a screaming girl, headed for the dance floor. His glasses had thick lenses and his hair fell in a bang over his brow. He had a woman's mouth and a receding chin. His clothing was awry and he was half drunk.

Jonas nudged Holliday and said: 'Sir Richard Riothlesley, Vanarvon's son....'

'A knight,' Holliday said to himself, and then quoted
Canterbury Tales
inaudibly: 'H
e was a verray parfit gentil
knight
'A
curious sort of grief suddenly clutched at his
throat, and he said to Jonas:' Let's get out of here. I want some air...

They went out and parted at the door, Jonas with the thought: 'What a queer, dull sort of duck.'

Holliday walked home through the deserted streets to the room he had found in a pleasant house on Bruton Street. The prostitutes in their silver fox capes were still hunting in pairs, standing in the doorways of New Bond Street and the bystreets, their eyes glistening in the lamplight. One of them, a pale, thin girl with black hair, spoke to him and said: 'Hello dear, don't you want to take me home with you ?'

He would have liked to have talked with her, but in London there are no places where one can sit up and drink at that hour except the bottle clubs. He walked on. 'Oh, come on, dear,' said the girl, and gave a high, shrill titter, 'we may all be blown to pieces soon, anyway.'

'God,' said Hiram Holli
day. 'Introduction to love .. .’
and half broke into a trot to reach his room

Hitler gave his ultimatum, the field grey hordes began to converge on the fortress of Czechoslovakia, and the waters of panic began to lap at England's feet. Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain flew back to London. Holliday was abroad, night and day in the streets of London, looking, listening, feeling, trying desperately to choke down the thing that was burning him. The statesmen went to Godesberg to meet with Hitler. The handbills of the newsboys changed hourly and grew wilder, bigger and blacker. Tension appeared in the voices of the B.B.C. announcers. Then Godesberg failed. Chamberlain warned the Czechs to mobilize. And the panic took London by the throat.

At noon of Black Tuesday, the day the British Fleet mobilized, a stoutish man, wearing steel-rimmed glasses behind which blazed bright blue eyes, and with sandy hair wildly dishevelled, rushed into the already overworked London Bureau of the
New York Sentinel.
The Bureau Chief, red-eyed from lack of sleep, was trying to collect his material, rumour and fact, for his first lead, and looked up irritated. It was Jonas who came out from an inner office and recognized him.

He said: 'Hello, Holliday, what's up? Bill, this is Hiram Holliday. He's on the desk back home. Here on vacation.'

The Bureau Chief grunted something about 'Hell of a time for a vacation....'

'Is
...
is someone sending the story?' cried Hiram Holliday.
...'
Is
...
is anyone
...
?'

Jonas looked amused. 'I'll say,' he said. 'This is the hottest we've had it yet. Roosevelt has cabled Hitler. Chamberlain is making a last speech. He may try to get in touch with Mussolini. The bombers may be over within twenty-four hours, m'boy. Got your hole picked
...
?'

'No
...
no
...
!' cried Hiram Holliday, his voice rising....

'To Hell with them
That's a damned card game. The
people, I mean
...
the story of the people
...
what's happened
to them, what they're doing
...
the fear
...
the pitiful pre
parations I've been all over. I've seen
...
a city of eight
million who think they're under sentence of death
...
the things they are doing, the
greedy, pitiful, stupid, human
things that mean the end of an empire, the finish of a great nation....'

The Bureau Chief's nerves were ragged. He snapped: 'Oh, cool off, Holliday, and don't try to tell us how to run our business. Go get yourself a drink if your nerve is going, or get on a boat for home - if you can.... We'll pick up the colour as we go. Who gives a ...'

'God damn it!' said Hiram Holliday, and his voice simply shattered the dingy office, rattled the desks and the wire trays and the papers, 'Get me a typewriter and some paper. I've been sitting on you birds long enough. I know you! Dictators, Prime Ministers, lands and armies! People want to know about people.... I'll write this story, and to hell with all of you....'

He strode through the swinging gate so that it crashed. The one impression that Jonas had was that somehow he had added two inches to his stature and that his face had gone from round to square, that his mouth had hardened into the lines of a trap, and that he was ablaze with vitality and power.

There was a vacant desk with a typewriter. He sat down, ripped off his coat and pulled down his tie and slapped a pack of cigarettes down in front of him. He threaded a book of paper into the machine so that the ratchets of the machine gave forth a vicious noise, and then wrote at the top of the page something he had never written in his life before, and never thought he would see:

'By Hiram Holliday.'

His fingers at first were stiff because it had been a long time since he had used a machine, but as the story that was in
him
burst its bounds like a loft fire that finds a flue and leaps from its confinement, the clatter of the machine speeded up until the smoke of Holliday's cigarettes seemed to rise from its interior to wreath his embattled head.

'There will be no war,' wrote Hiram Holliday, 'because England is England no more.' (This sentence the managing editor of the
New York Sentinel
threw away and regretted it, two days later.) 'The head o
f the greatest empire the world
has ever known has been blackmailed by fear. The very cabs of London crawl through the twisting
lanes more slowly because of fear, the people shuffle the streets with leaden feet that bear leaden hearts and watch their workmen scratch the pitiful ditches through the public parks, ditches that would not even hold the dead, much less the living were death to rain from the sky.

'London is blackmailed, naked, and afraid. The people walk the streets as though they had no clothes on. The pride that once clothed England and Englishmen has been frayed too thin for shelter.

'England is an old man with an armless sleeve and ribbons on his chest, and an old woman with tattered hair, and a little girl, kneeling at the tomb of the unknown soldier, dust of a man who died for less a cause than this, praying for peace.

'England has lost its strength, its wits and its guts. It is like a prize-fighter who will bribe and buy and connive to hold the championship he once fought for tooth and nail. Its answer to challenge is tuppence-worth of sandbags, leaned against billions worth of property, and flight to the country.'

Then he began to tell of the exodus of the rich to their funk-holes in the country, the jamming of the roads and the railway lines, and the blocking of all telephone lines to the south, Devon and Cornwall, to Wales and to Scotland, with every real estate agent glued to the telephone listening to offers of twice and three times the value for vacant houses, or even rooms, in the more remote and safer sections of England, where the threatening bombers would not come.

He told the story of the queues of people lined up at the centres where the gas-masks were distributed, and the screams of frightened children that rang all the day because of that choking moment when the gas-mask was fitted and tested, and no breath at all was possible, and he wrote about the old man who was once a General in the British Army, digging a shallow trench in his back yard in Putney, and saying: 'There. Ours is done. Tomorrow we'll dig one for the maids,' and about the food hoarders who stripped the neighbourhood stores of canned goods, and drove the stuff out into the country and buried it, and then made maps to enable them to find the cache again for themselves, when the bombs should have blasted the city into starvation.

He wrote of the scene in
the Haymarket where hundreds of
panic-stricken Americans storme
d the shipping offices and
fought and begged and bribed
to get as much as a cot or even
deck-space on a west-bound line
r, and the silent, half-crushed
crowds that stood outside of t
he Downing Street Ministry, and
Buckingham Palace - 'some in quest of news,
but more for the
comfort of gregariousness, and t
he thought that perhaps if they
were somewhere near the great a
nd the powerful, the talismanic
mantle that seemed always to
shield them would protect them too.