The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (19 page)

Hiram wasn't sure, but he said:
'I
...
I think
so....
I'll try
'

Then he felt himself picked up bodily by her right arm and thrown across in back of her. He helped by crawling, and tumbled finally into the empty seat beside her, where for the moment his senses left him, and he went out into the peace of blackness. The last thing he remembered was the touch of her fur against his face as he slumped over against her shoulder.

He came to after a little, his head throbbing and singing from the crack he had received. They were just driving out of a park and on to an avenue that seemed to border it which he suspected was the Tiergarten Strasse. The girl turned the car in before a huge iron gate which rolled open silently and automatically before she had brought the car to a halt and which closed behind them in the same manner after she had driven through. She drove on beneath the portico of a large, grey stone mansion, paused before garage doors which likewise opened for her. A uniformed chauffeur was waiting as well as a butler in livery. She spoke to them sharply in German, and they leaped to the door of the car and helped Hiram out.

'Franz - bring warm water in a basin and some cotton and antiseptic. The Herr has been injured.'

The butler bowed and said:
'Jawohl! Sofort, Frau Grafin,’
and turned to go, but she spoke again. 'Both of you pay attention. If there are any inquiries, I have not been out of the house tonight, nor has the car. If the inquirers should be persistent, refer them to Dr Grunze.'

^‘
Zu befehl! Frau Grafin’

Two things Hiram had understood - that the strong tall girl who had saved him was a
Grafin,
roughly, the equivalent of a duchess, and that he had heard mentioned the name of Dr Grunze, the mysterious little hunchback who was the Minister of foreign propaganda, a man very few people had ever seen, and whom no one knew. He felt better now, and suspected that he was not as badly hurt as he had thought. The chauffeur was supporting him, but he signalled that he wanted to try it alone, and managed very well. His right hand was cut, he had been trampled and beaten, but bis hat had saved him from a scalp wound.

A long passage-way led under the house from the garage. It ended in a little private elevator. The
Grafin
entered first and when Hiram followed under his own steam, she signalled for the chauffeur to leave them. She pushed a button and the lift took them to the second floor, and let them out into a
salon
of such sumptuous magnificence and taste as Hiram Holliday had never seen before. It was old-fashioned, and yet instinctively he knew that every piece in it was sound, every beautifully illuminated painting and statue a work of art. There was a log fire burning in the fireplace. The room upset Hiram immediately. Because of his strange sensitivity to inanimate objects, the chairs, the couches, the hangings, the rugs beneath his feet told him things that he only half-understood, but that raised the short hairs at the back of his neck. The butler was standing at a small table on which were basin and water, some bottles and lint. The
Gra
fin
dismissed him. Then she came over to Hiram. All of the hellish green fires were out of her eyes, and there was tenderness and concern on a face that to Hiram had at first seemed wholly cruel. Her coat had fallen open and revealed her beautiful body beneath the white nightgown, but she was unconscious of it. She took Hiram's hand in hers, and said: 'It is torn. Come, I will bathe it for you.'

Hiram drew back trembling. She exhaled perfume from every part of her, like a night flower. He knew already how this night must end, and still he retreated instinctively because he was not yet in command.

He said: 'Look - I'm really not badly hurt. I am deeply grateful for what you have done for me. If it hadn't been for you I would probably be dead by now. Would you just permit me to go and wash, and then I will leave.' He cursed himself for the stupid, stilted speech. She was there to be taken. He could press his face against her breasts if he but moved....

She let go his hand and stepped back. The twin lamps in the white face began to glow again. For a second he thought that he caught an expression that was utterly simple and pure, and almost child-like in its disappointment. Then she said coolly, and with hardly a trace of accent: 'You are hardly polite, my friend. You have not even taken the trouble to tell me your name.'

Hiram rose to the challenge. 'It is Hiram Holliday. And yours ?'

'I am Irmgarde von Hel
m. Why are you so anxious to go?’
She was now standing at full height, and staring at him directly. The green eyes challenged the light blue ones behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. Hiram's face was smeared and his sand-coloured hair ruffled, and there was still a thin line of blood that seeped from the corner of his mouth and down one side of his chin. His clothes were disarranged and he looked no figure of a hero, but the eyes behind their windows, and the curl of the mouth in the round, bland, undistinguished face cried out to her: 'Be careful - I am a man,' and beneath the stoutish figure the tall
Grafin
saw a gallant and gleaming knight and could hardly bear her yearning for his strength.

Hiram answered her. He said: 'For two reasons. I have work to
do....
'

'And the other...

'Because I do not like you.' But Hiram's inward voice cried to him:
Coward
...
because if I stay I must get
my
fingers to your throat, or
my
mouth to yours.

The Grafin Irmgarde drew in a sharp breath, but before she could speak Hiram, impelled by the pictures of what he had seen that suddenly flooded his mind again, said
:'
Why were you there ? What were you doing
there ? What was there for you?’

Lies scattered themselves through Irmgarde's mind, but she could catch none of them. This strange, plain-looking man drew the truth from her before
she knew she was speaking it. ‘F
or a thrill.'

Hiram made a little sound in his throat. He was safe now. She was bad. She was evil. She had gone for pleasure to see men held helpless and beaten, and property and the collected beauty of centuries destroyed. Hiram could
not keep his feelings from his face.

Irmgarde suddenly took Hiram by both shoulders: 'No
...
no,' she cried - 'don't judge. Perhaps I went to torture myself with hatred for those things which we do. Do you think that I was there because it was good what they did ?'

‘
I
saw
you....
I saw your face
...'
said Hiram bitterly.
'I
could have killed you
...
because everything in it was
...
evil
..

Irmgarde made no protest. She said simply: 'And you are good and clean and brave. I feel
it....
I saw it. When you struck your blow it was as though in my head was the music of a great, clear, beautiful chord. And when I reach for something that is good, that is clean and honest
...'
she suddenly opened the hands that were holding his shoulders so that they were again empty of him - 'then it is no longer there. It is never there. Am I so bad
...
so bad
...'

Suddenly she blazed at him in an explosion of temper:

‘
You
...
you
...
you,
standing there. Do you know who
I am? I am Grunze's woman. He owns me, the hunchback doctor who hates the world for its beauty and who in the name of Nazi will take and destroy the beauty in every other country, as just now was destroyed the piano of Mozart. You
...
you
...
you chivalrous fool. Your country, too! The plans are made, the discord already sown
...
his agents are at work night and day. Are they all like you, over there, the men, willing to die for the
beau geste ?
To strike a blow for beauty and the weak, even though they die for it ? We strike at beauty and the weak, and strike and strike and strike again for the feeling of power. We must have power. Because of the power it gave me I belong to Grunze, but I have not my soul any more. Germany has not its soul any
more....
Hiram
...
Hiram
...
let me only touch you once. Let me
...
let me
..
‘

But it was Hiram who took her, dirty and bloody, and aching as he was, for in his mind he had already taken her when she told him that she belonged to Dr Grunze, and their love-making was a battle, a fierce, uncompromising struggle of souls and bodies, each fighting to take from the other and devour what they wanted, he, flame and flood and danger and the fierce brutal vitality of her, she wrestling to drain into her body all the strength and decency and pure unashamed valour and knightliness that she had seen in him, coming to him parched, as though he were a crystal fountain. Her wild, hungry contact with Hiram was almost religious in its ecstasy and
longing. His blood upon her
was a bath that might once more
wash her clean. Hiram's passion was all male and triumphant.
He took because he could n
ot help himself, and because in
taking he knew he dared the gods as well as man
.

It was seven in the morning when he left her. There was a passage from the house that went through another and led to an exit in an innocent little alley opening on to the Rauch Strasse so that he avoided the imposing Tiergarten Strasse entrance which might have been watched. He felt that he was half-mad from the things he had seen and the things that had happened to him, but he had his story to tell, and that drove him on. By cab he went to the Friedrich Strasse and watched the destruction and looting of the Arcade shops, and saw the children delving into the ruins for toys, their faces candy-smeared from previous thefts. He toured the textile centres in the Kronen Strasse and saw the work go on at the Tauntzien Strasse, Leipziger Strasse and Alexander Platz, and on the Friedrich Strasse, on the other side of Unter Den Linden, he watched young boys wreck and loot and destroy.

And then he went back to his hotel and wrote his story. He had not the faintest idea of how he would get it out of Berlin, but write it he must, and his words were scorched with the fires of the burning temples, his sentences cut and splintered by the shattered glass that littered the pavements of Berlin, and bathed in the blood of beaten men. He wrote with the sounds and odours of the wild morning still in his ears and nostrils, and with all of the passion that he had found in Irmgarde and taken from her.

When he had finished he was exhausted in body and spirit, but he would not yet permit himself to sleep. An idea was gnawing at him. He had not signed the story. One copy he placed in an envelope and sent over to Biederman by messenger to the
Sentinel
office in the Dorotheen Strasse. The other he put into his pocket. He went not to a post office, but walked on foot to the Lehrter Bahnhof, and there, at the busy Government telegraph office in the
branch post office, gave in his
story addressed to Wallace Reck, the Hotel Ambassador, Prague. Reck was the Prague correspondent of the
Sentinel.
He paid for the telegram, gave a false name and address and walked out of the station. He then returned to the Adlon and went to bed.

Biederman received the story, read it, turned pale and began to tremble. He shut himself in his inner office, placed it in the small coal grate fireplace and set fire to it. He did not stop trembling until it was reduced to ashes and he had trampled and scattered them with his feet.

But the man in the Lehrter Bahnhof telegraph office sent the story to Prague. Later, he was sent to concentration camp for having done so. His only excuse was that he had been busy, and confused, and the telegram had not been addressed to America, or England, or France, in which case he would have, of course, notified the authorities. For Reck, Prague correspondent of the
Sentinel,
had immediately re-cabled the story to New York.

Hiram slept for eleven hours. When he awoke it was one o'clock in the morning. He was awakened by the ringing of the telephone bell at his bedside. It was Irmgarde. She said: 'Hiram
...
Hiram.... Please.... I must see you. Will you come to me again.... Through the Rauch Strasse. I'll
wait....
Hiram
...'

'Yes,' said Hiram Holliday, 'I'll come
.,

How Hiram Holliday Was Not but Was in Berlin

He went to her, he tried to tell himself, for many reasons, and chiefly, he clung to the idea that he was a newspaperman. There had been the hint that she had dropped off the far-reaching designs against his own country, and he wanted to know more about the activities of the new Germany in the United States.