The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (11 page)

'My Hiram. My strange, beloved American. The next time it will be you. You cannot stay here. They will find you as they found
...
the other. It was I nearly who gave you away tonight, because I loved you. I would have killed myself, Hiram, if it had been so. Something of me will die when you go, but that I can bear because what we have had has been so beautiful. But if they take you I could not bear it. Hiram
...
Hiram.... All beauty does end. Let this end so that I know you are safe -safe, somewhere.'

They clung desperately to one another and Hiram knew that she was right. Later he said: 'But how can I get out? Every avenue will be watched. They will check my passport and find - Hiram Holliday.'

Again it was Lisette who said: 'No, no! You are not Hiram Holliday. You are Grognolle, the great clown who never speaks. They will not ask for the passport of the Great Grognolle. You will see. It will be made known at the airport who it is that is leaving. You are more famous in Paris than the President or the Prime Minister. No one will ask.'

'I
...
I will fly to Prague,' said Hiram Holliday, and then hid his face in his hands and tried to blot out those inner messages that came to him from the deep well of his being and told him those happy, gay, wonderful days were over and that this dark, brave, shining companion whose heart had been his, he would never see again.

High in the air, in the silvery plane carrying him to Prague and safety, the quiet man with the round face and the remarkable blue eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, who was known to the other passengers as Grognolle, took a clipping from his wallet and re-read it. It was a brief cutting from a column of news and gossip he had taken from the
Paris Herald.
It stated in effect that the Princess Adelheit (Heidi) von Furstenhof of Styria, once a well-known figure in Paris society, was now rumoured to be living in Prague.

The man sighed, replaced the clipping, and leaned back and

closed his eyes, and the gay, lovely face of the girl of the circus filled every cranny of his mind, and in his ears once more rang the shattering peals of laughter pouring over him in waves from the packed arena of the Cirque Antoine.

ILLUSION
IN
PRAGUE

How Hiram Holliday Sought a Princess and Found a Man with a False Beard

Hiram Holliday
saw the man with the false beard for the first time in the lobby of the Hotel Ambassador, situated in Prague on the broad, stately Vaclavske Namesti. He had returned there shortly before nine o'clock, tired and depressed after another day of his curious and wholly illogical search f
or the Princess Adelheit von Fü
rstenhof of Styria.

What surprised Hiram and gave him pause was not that the man should be in disguise, but rather that the appendage should be so obviously false, and that he was wearing it so badly. Hiram had already become accustomed to the bizarre character of the lobby of the Central European hotel with its inevitable scattering of mysterious and slightly sinister characters which peopled the collection of little tables behind potted palm trees from early morning until closing time, obvious conspirators who leaned with heads together and talked endlessly, men who sat the whole day through and watched the revolving entrance door; Czechs, Jews, Germans, Yugo-Slavs, Slovenes, Russians, sitting over tall glasses of Pilsener, an atmosphere redolent of suspicion and intrigue. They belonged, somehow, to the gloomy, dour, rainy, medieval Prague that Hiram had discovered in his lonely wanderings through the city, a city that had been doomed to death from the air and which had not yet emerged from the shock of the reprieve.

Hiram was
at
first startled and then inclined to smile when he saw him (though at later times when he encountered him, he did not smile at all), because, to begin with, the beard material was not of the same colour as the hair, and then it seemed to have been put on crooked. The unmasking, or rather de-bearding of the renegade White Russian l
eader, General
Vinovarieff, by the French detectives in the Cirque Antoine was still fresh and vivid in Hiram's mind, and it had been somewhat of an education to him in what may be done with effective disguise in the hands of an expert. The man who stood at the desk, conversing with the blue-coated
portier
in the Czech language, was obviously the rankest kind of an amateur at the game.

Holliday studied him while he waited his turn to query the
portier
as to whether an expected cablegram from New York had arrived for him. The man was of medium height, elderly as indicated by the sprinkling of grey in his brown hair. He had dark eyes sunk deep into shadowy sockets, thickish lips half concealed by a moustache that was obviously as false as the beard, and he wore a rusty b
lack frock-coat and a black Hom
burg hat.

But the hair of the beard was a reddish brown, almost rust-coloured, apparently coarser, and it was on askew. The hair line on one side of the face was lower than on the other, and in itself was plainly detectable. In shape, the appendage was square and bushy, and reminded Hiram of similar ones he had seen to be purchased for twenty-five cents in any of the trick and joke shops that lined Forty-second Street between Lexington and Third Avenue, shops that specialized in sneeze powder and stink bombs.

The
portier
made a motion with his head, indicating apparently that he had something confidential to say, and the man leaned across the desk to bring his ear closer to his mouth, and for one horrible moment Holliday entertained the notion that the beard was about to fall off, and he cringed a little with anticipatory embarrassment. This, however, did not happen. The beard merely waggled as the man nodded in response to the
portier
's
words. He then turned and went out into the street through the revolving door.

The
portier
handed Hira
m a cablegram. It was from Beau
held, his Managing Editor in New York, and read:

'Congratulations relieved you are safe 500 bonus awaiting you stop suggest you lay low until our men square Paris rap stop expect results from there shortly stop contact Wallace Reck our man in Prague stop further instructions shortly.'

Hiram smiled, and for the moment the depression that had gripped him since he had arrived in Prague lifted. He was remembering the days on the copy-desk when a two-dollar bonus for a cleverly written headline was money. He went to a vacant table in the lobby lounge and ordered a tall glass of Pilsener, and sat sipping it, a quiet, inconspicuous figure in a raincoat and a crushed felt hat. Men and women at nearby tables glanced at him and then returned to their whispering. Here and there newspapers were lowered. Eyes speculated upon him. The newspapers were raised again. There were a half-dozen secret agents of various nations in the lounge. They noted the attire, the round face with what seemed to be washed-out blue eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, the bland expression, and marked him down as a dull and harmless American tourist.

No one could possibly have suspected that this undistinguished, colourless, close-to-middle-age fellow was a man pursuing a stubborn and unreasonable quest, the results of which were to have repercussions in a grey building in Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse and cost a traitor his life. . For in Hiram Holliday's wallet there burned the clipping cut from the
Paris Herald,
a brief notice to the effect that the P
rincess Adelheit (Heidi) von Fü
rstenhof of Styria, well known in Paris, was thought to be living in exile in Prague.

And
Hiram had hunted for Heidi in Prague. He had looked for her high and low, but the search had been conducted by him according to his own nature, his recent weird experiences in London and Paris, and also in terms of the gloomy, rain-spattered, hag-ridden, romantic old middle-European city. Before Paris and London he probably would have acted a great deal differently. He would have gone to Wallace Reck, or any of the three big Press service correspondents in Prague, and asked whether they knew of any such person, and if so, where she was. And one or all of them might have told him.

But he had been touched by the purest adventure in Paris and London, and Hiram Holliday was a man who never had known physical adventure before. Even to dream about such things as had actually befallen Hiram is dangerous and heady stuff. He had been thrown into bizarre and dramatic events too suddenly, and it had affected his balance and disturbed the cold, even detached mental attitude of the veteran copy-desk man who reads everything set before his eyes, and accepts or believes nothing. When he had first arrived in Paris he had not yet been able to evaluate the physical adventure that he had lived through in London. He had regarded it as a bizarre accident and had been content to consider it as such. He had put aside the temptation to try to see Heidi again.

The days as Grognolle in the Cirque Antoine had altered him. The climax to that adventure had tipped the scales and he suddenly saw life as from an orchestra seat, extravagantly and theatrically. It became inconceivable to him that he should ever again encounter this Princess he knew at first only as a girl named Heidi, in any but romantic circumstances. She was, he told himself, in danger. The idea grew into a conviction fed only by his imagination, and out of that conviction grew a stubborn determination, to find her, to be there when she should need him again. And thus as he ranged the cobbled streets and twisted alleys of the ancient baroque city, his eyes were searching constantly for the small, brave, white face, and his ears were ever attuned to catch the sound of her faint cry for help.

The plane that brought him from Paris to Prague had descended through rain and mist to land, and it had rained ever since. Rain lay over Prague in an enveloping cloak, glistening from the streets, enhancing the mystery of the towered churches and fortresses, changing their shapes, making them loom larger and more menacing and mysterious, just as the curtain of romanticism had fallen over his own mind. Sometimes the spiny towers of the old Tyn Church on the Market Place, opposite the still more ancient City Hall, vanished into the grey, boiling mists, and then his imagination was uncapped, and he visioned them as topless and ever rising.

After the wonderful bronze and copper shades of Paris and her pastel flower-beds and pale blue autumn skies, Prague was grey, and drab, and heavy, and depressed. The shapes of the more modern houses reminded him of barracks, and the massive masonry of the medieval piles weighed him down. Windows were slits in ancient walls three feet thick, and iron-barred. It was the face of Heidi that he kept envisioning behind them. For all its modernity Prague was a city of fairy towers and ogre's dungeons, of old walls, and dormers, casement and embrasure, of postern, wicket- and lych-gate. Arthur Rackham, or Edmond Dulac, who had illustrated the fairy tales Holliday had read as a child, might have conceived it. And Heidi was a blood Princess, and in that other world into which he was leaning too much, princesses languished in towers.

Hiram felt gloomy and depressed in Prague because he was so acutely sensitive to the gloom and depression of the inhabitants. Searching around in his mind for a comparison, he decided that all the people in Prague somehow resembled the rag-tag of the off-streets of New York, like First and Second Avenues. There was no colour or life in them, or in their clothing, or their bearing, or very little hope either. A little taxi-driver who spoke English said to him: 'What is the
good ? They have give us our liv
es and take away our freedom. The German, he can liff without a soul, but not we Czechs.'

Yes, Hiram had felt, that was the difference. London and Paris sprang back into gaiety, lights, laughter, dancing, music, and joy, when the cloud had passed. He thought he understood, perhaps for the first time, why men are willing to die for freedom. Later, when he reviewed in his mind the things he did in Prague, and the absurd passage with the Man with the False Beard, he could realize how profoundly disturbed he had been by the weight of misery and the emotional drag that lay over the city. Because his antidote, more than ever, had been his queer, coloured imagination that yearned for the high and gallant adventure that transcends all the cheerless misery of truth.

He had climbed to the great grey fortress on the left bank of the Moldau, the Hradcany, and there wandered through rain and fog down the Street of the Alchemists, an old, old, tired alley with tiny, tired houses, built into the masonry of the fortress wall, houses that leaned to one another for support, the aged leaning upon the aged. With his mind he peopled them with the fusty-bearded alchemists at their cauldrons and crucibles, and the bare, deserted, rain-drenched streets he dressed with spurred and belted bravoes trailing their long swords. He himself felt as though he wore at his belt the long, basket-hiked rapier of Toledo steel, and once at a window, a tiny dormer under a roof so low he could have touched it with his hand, he was sure he saw the lovely, hunted face of Heidi, and heard her cry:
^‘
A moi, Hiram, a moi.'
But there was nothing at the window but rain streaks on the pane, and no sound but the old grating and creaking of the hanging lamps and metal signs outside the houses.