The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (9 page)

The man sighed patiently, and said: 'That is a pity, M'sieur Holliday. I had hoped that I was mistaken.' He then reached inside the breast of his frock-coat and produced a small nickel-plated pistol, which he fired at Hiram Holliday without further warning.

Simultaneously with the sharp little 'spang,' Hiram heard the bullet smack into the wall behind him and threw an ash-tray at the man's head, and then a magazine, a book, a sheaf of > papers, a mineral water bottle, a glass, anything and everything he could lay his hands on.

He did these things as a reflex, but it was an old idea stored away, something he had been told by his pistol-shooting instructor at the Armoury in New York, a grizzled sergeant who had said: 'If you're ever in a jam in a room with a fellow who has a gun and you have none, throw everything at him you can lay your hands on, and keep on throwing until you can get to him. It will spoil his aim. The average man, if he is excited, will miss you at ten feet. Things flying through the air at him will make him duck instinctively....'

The little gun, did not go off again, the bottle had scored a direct hit, and the fatherly gentleman stood there weaving a little. Hiram brought him down with the simple trick known to every ju-jitsu pupil, he slid for his legs, and with his own feet tripped the other's put from under him, one foot hooked behind, the other applying pressure from the front. With the same movement, he scrambled up and over and behind him and brought his left forearm across the man's throat, his hand holding his own right shoulder. His right arm he brought over the man's shoulder and then back behind his head, and then with his right hand pushed the head slowly forward against the bar-lock of his own left arm.

Now, ju-jitsu practised in a gymnasium with a clever and benevolent instructor is one thing, and the same art as applied to the person of a potential killer is quite another. When the ju-jitsu student or exponent feels himself caught in a grip that is too much for him or is threatening to break a limb if the pressure is increased, he pats the nearest part of his opponent that he can reach and the bout is over. Also it takes a genuine expert to apply holds so as not to injure a man. Holliday was no expert. The man struggled and threshed with his legs. Hiram increased the pressure. The man did not reach up and pat him to signify submission. He continued the pressure until the man gave a sudden convulsive shudder and relaxed and lay still. It was not until long after that Hiram realized that he had applied the wrong hold.

It was over. And Hiram Holliday knew that he was badly frightened, that in fact he was no longer Hiram Holliday. For the first time he realized the truth of the many interviews with persons who had committed acts of violence, that passed through his fingers on the copy-desk; that what they had done thereafter seemed like a badly remembered dream.

He did not know whether the man was alive or dead. He only knew that he wanted to get out, to people, to his own kind, to keep on going. He was still wearing his hat and coat. Incongruously he snatched up his umbrella, hung it over his arm by the crook and hustled out of the room. Any moment people would come, attracted by the shot. He must get to the
Sentinel
Bureau and see Clegg at once and tell him everything. Miraculously the tiny, self-operating lift was waiting at the landing when he reached it. He got in and pushed the button for the ground floor. The windows were of frosted glass, but as he descended he saw the shapes of men passing on the way up, and heard their feet pounding on the stairs.

There were five or six men standing in the lobby by the porter's desk, and Hiram held himself to walking past them slowly. But one of them suddenly cried out in German:
'Das

i
st
er
Hallo.
...
Halt!' -
and made a grab for him. Hiram

ducked and ran through the door and turned left up the street with the men streaming after him. He was frightened at the forces he had invoked, and driven very close to the panic of the hunted when there came a sound like a back-fire from behind him, and something went 'Pht' past his left ear. It was a long street, a full three hundred yards more before he would reach a turning. He wondered what it would feel like to be bit. Then he was conscious that a car was running close beside him. A good-humoured voice said in French: 'Taxi, m'sieu ?'

Hiram made the running-board with a leap and flung himself inside. Through the rear window he saw the men piling into a car. He had forgotten about Clegg and the
Sentinel
Bureau. He was hunted and he wanted a warren in which to run to earth.

'Montmartre!
Vite!’
he gasped to the driver. He had remembered the twisting, crooked streets. He also knew that German agents were now aware that he had abstracted papers that concerned them vitally, and that he was in deep trouble.

Because all Paris cabbies drive like mad, Hiram kept some two hundred yards in front of the following car. He knew that if they caught up with him they would kill him. And then suddenly he acted purely on hunch and instinct. He saw the lights of the Cirque Antoine, the huge electric sign advertising its glories. He stopped the cab, handed the driver a twenty-franc note, bought a ticket and went inside. He had a wild idea that he could lose himself in the audience. But as he went through the door, he saw the pursuing car draw up and the men piling out.

He no longer felt that there would be any security in the circus crowd. There was a deadly and uncompromising implacability in the pursuit. He hustled around the encircling corridor to the rear, to the only friend he knew.

She was standing outside the door of her dressing-room with her white horse, waiting for her cue to go on.

'Lisette,' panted Hiram Holliday. 'I'm in a jam. They're trying to kill me. Is there anywhere I can go ? Lisette! Quickly!'

Anyone but a Frenchwoman would have screamed, or stopped to ask questions, or wasted time. Lisette simply said: ' Oh,
mon Dieu!
Hiram!' opened the door to her dressing-room, drew him inside with her and slammed it shut.

The men ranged the back-stage area like wolves, over the protests of the doorman through whom they had brushed without the formality of tickets. They searched the stables and behind the bar, the men's room, the property room, and began to walk unceremoniously into dressing-rooms. In the arena, the Six Riding Cossacks were performing to the pistol-like cracks of the whip of the huge seventh Cossack, reports that would cover and justify the sharp spang of a pistol. And they came eventually, two of them, big men, young, powerful, rosy-cheeked, yellow-haired, arrogant, to the gold-starred door of Lisette Pollarde, Equestrienne Queen of the Cirque Antoine. They burst it open.

'Hola?
said Lisette in French. 'If you please! At my door it is the custom to knock.'

The men stood framed in the doorway. One of them had his hand in his pocket. They stared at the lovely circus girl in her short, spangled costume of white and silver, and the sad-eyed, sad-faced, trampolin clown who sat with her at her dressing-table, putting the finishing touches to his white and scarlet face.

He wore the ragged, tattered garb of the classic tramp clown, reminiscent of Joe Jackson, the out-at-the-toes, too big shoes, the battered derby hat, the patched baggy pants and grotesque shirt-front. His nose was shining red, and his mouth painted over the white face was a scarlet inverted 'U' of misery, and two great dark rings accentuated the pathos of his eyes. Strands of a ragged, wispy, red-coloured wig stuck out from beneath the battered derby. He was clutching a ragged and torn umbrella with one hand.

From the arena came a long-drawn finishing chord, and then a burst of a gay, saucy music.

'Allo
ns,
Grognolle,' said Lisette.
'C'est a nous !'

Without another glance, she moved between the two hot-eyed men in the doorway followed by the grotesque, pathetic, shuffling clown. It was thus that Hiram Holliday, erstwhile copy-reader for the
New York Sentinel,
found himself in the middle of the Cirque Antoine in Paris, centred in a white pool of light behind which lurked some thousand gleaming eye-balls, rising tier upon tier, and heard Lisette say, as she leaped to the back of the cantering, snow-white Capitan:

'Mesdames et Messieurs - II me fait grand plaisir de vous pr
esenter, mon oncle Grognolle. Il
ne
parle jamais!'

Hiram Holliday's legs were weak. He felt frightened, sick and dizzy. He shuffled across the ring dragging the remains of his umbrella and sat down limply on the raised edge, his hands folded over the crook of the umbrella handle, his head hanging dejectedly. And a woman sitting close by laughed.

Hiram looked at her reproachfully and the woman cried:
'Oh, le pauvre drole,'
and laughed again. Hiram moved a little so that he could observe her better and turned his mournful gaze full upon her, and the woman let out a shriek of mirth that was taken up by her neighbours. He was a little resentful of the laughter at first. And then he suddenly remembered the mournful mask with which the quick, experienced fingers of the circus-girl had endowed him, in those fearful few minutes in her dressing-room, when he had told her what he could of his adventure, and she had hidden him from all eyes beneath the chalk and vermilion of the circus clown.

A change came over him. He began to experiment with the laughter of the woman in the audience, a stout, motherly soul with a hair mole on her face. He sighed, she laughed more loudly. He looked at her with a steady gaze and her shrieks increased. He now set himself to imagine that she was the most beautiful creature in all the world and that he longed for her hopelessly. He turned away in despair and walked a step and then whipped around and sat down again, his eyes yearning for her face. The woman was screaming with joy. Her laughter was incendiary, and one by one the candles of mirth were kindled until the whole section in which she sat was ablaze. Hiram turned his face upon a good-looking young girl in the third row, and she immediately became convulsed. He turned his gaze back to the first woman and sighed to show her that he had not forgotten her and she shrieked louder than ever, and the audience catching the connexion and the by-play shouted, and cried: 'Ah
...
ah, Grognolle, remember your first love
...
she is the one for you.'

Hiram tried something else. He decided to pretend that it was suddenly raining and that he must put up his battered umbrella, the umbrella that he had fought with in London, the umbrella that Lisette had torn and broken, at the last minute in the dressing-room, to make it a thing of comedy.

Of pantomime, of the art of clowning, Hiram Holliday at that time knew nothing, though he learned with amazing rapidity. But this he knew. He must himself believe with all his soul and being that it was raining, that he was afraid to be in the rain, and that he must somehow open his bent and tattered umbrella to seek shelter from it. Thus, he worked slowly, and with infinite care and patience, studying with deep grief and dejection each broken strut, and torn bit of black linen, widening the rents, breaking it further, until the thing that he finally elevated over his head with infinite misery, despair and sense of utter failure, was a tangled, hopeless wreck of steel and cloth. His reward was peal after peal of laughter that seemed to rock the slim, circular building and which brought fat, moustached Papa Antoine, impresario of the Cirque, rushing from his office to stare in amazement at two things. The first was gendarmes ejecting a half-dozen men who had apparently rushed through the gates without paying, and had been breaking into dressing-rooms. The other was a new clown of whose existence he had not even known, and who had the ancient Cirque shaking to such peals of joyous laughter as it had not heard in his lifetime.