The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (31 page)

Di Cavazzo was not
at
all disturbed. 'Ah,' he said. 'To that I was coming. A matter of precedence. If the articles were offensive to the Government, as indeed they are, they were doubly so to those whom they directly impugned.'

The first alarm bell sounded in Hiram.

'You have reflected upon the honour of the Italian soldier, minimized the glories of his recent achievements, and cast reflections upon his courage.'

'That's true.'

Di Cavaz
zo drew a sharp breath, and Ara
Pesca turned red. The Lieutenant recovered himself and continued in his calm, even voice. 'The Army has been able to persuade the Government that it holds every prior right to demand satis
faction. Thus, Commendatore Ara
Pesca, liimself a distinguished journalist like yourself, and I, are here to represent the interests of Colonel Rafael Del Tevere, of the Italian Army, who requests that you do him the honour of meeting him at such time and place and with such weapons as you or your seconds, as the challenged party, shall decide. If you will be good enough to name someone to act for you we can arrange the details.'

There was then a silence broken only by the breathing of the four men in the dingy, littered little office.

'Hell's bells, Hiram,' exploded Proggi, suddenly. 'You're being challenged to a duel.' He turned upon the Lieutenant. 'You chaps must be nuts. Americans don't fight duels. I'll have this out with the Ministry. Holliday has never had a weapon in his hand in his life. I know Del Tevere. He won the Olympic Military Pentathlon. He has killed three men in duels already.'

'On the contary,' said Di Cavazzo quietly, 'Mr Holliday is an able and experienced fencer, and, I am given to understand, a more than competent pistol shot. I myself have had the ·pleasure of crossing blades with
him
in friendly bouts in the
salle
at the Studio, where he had honoured us by his presence for the last few months. It is the hope of Colonel Del Tevere that Mr Holliday will select a weapon in which he feels himself the most at home, preferably, of course, the sword, the weapon of officers and, ah - gentlemen.'

'And what,' said Hiram Holliday, suddenly, 'if I should refuse?'

Di Cavazzo shrugged. 'Then', he said, 'it would be the unfortunate duty of the Government to insist upon your immediate expulsion from the country.' He paused for a moment, and his dark eyes glittered from his olive face: 'Not, however, for the offence given by your articles.'

'But..
.'said
Hiram.

'It will then be necessary for
my colleague, Commendatore Ara
Pesca, whose articles, whose every word, is quoted not only in the newspapers of the Continent, but those of your own country as well, to write that you have been expelled from Italy, not for your opinions, but for lacking the courage to back them with, ah
...
the kind of action that you decry as failing in the Italian soldier, and also to indicate that your continued presence here under those circumstances would necessarily be contaminating to all Italians.'

The beautiful simplicity of it staggered Hiram for a moment. But he said: 'And if I should agree to meet Colonel Del Tevere, and win?'

The Lieutenant showed his fine
white teeth again. 'In that
case,' he declared, 'the Army will be happy to maintain your right to express your opinion - ah
...
as long as you are able to - ah - defend it so ably.'

Proggi swore suddenly. 'Damn your impudence,'he shouted. 'You're planning a murder. Say the word, Hiram, and we'll throw the pair of them out of here.'

Di Cavazzo never even turned his head. He was regarding Holliday with a slight smile on his face.

Hiram shook his head. 'Thanks, Fred. No. I
...
I want to think this out. I've got to think it out. Don't you see, if I decline
...'
He turned to the two Italians: 'Gentlemen, will you come to the Hotel Russie tomorrow morning at ten o'clock ? I will give you my answer, and if it is in the affirmative, I shall have my second with me. You have explained the affair quite clearly. Thank you.'

In Berlin, Hiram Holliday had been trapped by an elaborate, heavy-handed typically German plot, and landed in a death-cell in Moabit prison. But now, pacing his old-fashioned apartment in the Hotel Russie, he realized that that had been childish compared to the simple ingenuity of the snare that was now laid for him in Rome. It was Italian to the core. Physically and psychologically, it was air-tight. He saw no choice between death and disgrace. And he had no illusions as to the truth that one or the other was imminent. It was so Roman-like to have added the torture of giving him his choice.

He had gone over the consequences of refusing to fight, a thousand times. That path led back to safety, it was true, but safety on the rim of the copy-desk of his paper, and to that he knew there could be no returning. There would be many who might applaud his stand in declining to fight a duel. But to the majority he would be the man who had been chased out of Italy, not with the honour that fell to other correspondents who had been forced to leave because they were incorruptible and uncompromising, but as a coward who had been ostensibly offered his chance to remain and had failed to accept it because of regard for his skin.

Because Hiram was a huma
n being, the approbation of his
fellow-man was important to him. But above all, because he was Hiram Holliday, his own self-esteem was more important than anything. It was himself he had to face, waking and dreaming, in the knowledge that when the moment came for which, following his romantic bent, he had been training himself through the long, dull years on the copy-desk, when in his free hours he had learned to fight the weapons of ancient, as well as modern man, and had drilled himself in the physical accomplishments of the heroes of another day, he had failed, had deliberately turned his back upon this other world in which he had lived in his mind for so long and sought the safety of the law and the narrow life.

And the alternative was to bleed away his life because of a sliver of steel run through his heart or lung by a stranger.

For he had no illusions either as to the outcome of the duel. He was too capable a fencer for that. Colonel Del Tevere was not only an Olympic fencing champion and a master of the French
epee,
or duelling-sword, but he was also a veteran of personal combat, having fought some seven duels, three of which had terminated fatally for his opponent.

It is a curious thing about fencing that a little knowledge is more dangerous than none. A good fencer is in much more jeopardy against a wild, unorthodox novice, who, discarding form, is liable to land with a lucky point. But the more the habits of a man are grooved into the classic and orthodox lines of defence and attack, the more certain he will fall victim to the superior speed, craft, strength and skill of one who is a champion.

And because he himself was a classroom fencer, with his muscles set, Hiram knew that Del Tevere would most certainly kill him. He might play the Colonel for a time, in fact, Del Tevere would most certainly prolong the end as long as possible to avoid any possible charges of an assassination, but there could be but one finish to the fight. The farther it went, the worse it would be for Hiram. His legs would tire, his arm grow heavy, his point would waver, there would be a grunt and a lightning movement and h
e would be spitted. He wondered
whether he would feel it as a hot, searing pain, or merely as a merciful blackness from which he would never emerge. Or whether, all strength gone from his limbs, he would sink to the ground to cough out his life from a punctured lung.

It was a warm, fragrant, stilly Roman night. Hiram went out on to his terrace overlooking the famous Russie gardens. Bits of white statuary glimmered, star-lit, through the shadows of the lacy shrubs and flowers. Was he a fool, to think of passively leaving this deep beauty for ever for an outmoded ideal ? He did not believe Di Cavazzo's story of the challenge. It went deeper. The presence
of the important journalist Ara
Pesca alone was an indication of that, for the man was a party mouthpiece. Hiram knew that he had mounted up an account in totalitarian Europe. In Germany he had been loved by a woman belonging to a dangerous statesman. In Vienna he had succumbed to the sweet lure of the romantic role of kingmaker. Now the bill was being presented for collection. Did they know the truth now in Berlin ? Was the long Nazi hand reaching into Italy ? Did not that give him the right to secure his own safety ? But what safety, and what security ? A discredited correspondent? The phrase, 'Chased out of Italy,' would follow him as long as he lived. Men like Hiram Holliday could not live under stigma.

He thought, too, of Heid
i, the Princess Adelheit von Fü
rstenhof of Styria, and their curious casual meeting that day in the Roman Forum. Who did she love, this immaculate Princess of another day whom he had aided in the purest meaning of Domnei, the old, medieval woman service ? Was it d'Aquila, the valiant and dapper little Italian Count who served her, too ? Once, when they, Hiram and Heidi, had stood ski-shod on the summit of the Gross Loffler, that supposedly impassable barrier between Austria and Italy, and prepared to risk the descent to the Italian side, Hiram had thought that he had conquered when she had looked him in the eyes and said: 'Hiram, if anything should happen to me
...'
Had she meant what he had when he had said the same thing, that if he died in the descent, he died loving her ?

And what if she
had?
Probably already she regretted it. What was there in life for them
both?
A flat, a radio, an ice-box and a car? Was that an end for people who had lived dangerously and romantically, for a woman who by her blood was a dynast ? One did not go on and on having adventures until sooner or later bullet-hit or knife found its mark, but neither did one, the vows spoken, surrender to the Philistines.

Perhaps the Colonel and his needle-pointed sword were the answer to a great many things, the answer, in fine, to everything. Hiram shook off the mood and went back into his rooms. He would wrestle with his dangerous dilemma until there was no longer a grain of sand in the cup of the hour-glass.

All over Rome the bells great and small began to toll midnight. They tolled in dissonance and polyphony, in twos and threes like a roundelay, until
at
last midnight was done and there was silence again. A breeze, heavily scented, blew in from the blossom-laden gardens and stirred a drape against the wall and disturbed the Roman sword that hung there. It clashed and rang gently against the wall the barest whisper of old, strong iron, the merest susurration of a distant call to arms.

And Hiram leaped to it and tore it down, held it in his right hand and shook it, and again it told him all that he had felt in the dingy curio shop, and this time a hundredfold more.

Again he felt the presence of its owner, stocky, powerful, swarthy, brutally beautiful, black hair, mocking eyes and mouth, reeking of sweat and garlic, but brimming with life and strength and vitality and the conqueror's spirit. He had fought them all, the Parthian, the Macedonian, the Egyptian, the Jew and the wild woad-painted Briton, and his own brother, too, in the civil wars that had torn the old republic. With the sword and the wild, unquenchable ferment in his blood, he, the Roman Legionary, had carved out his destiny and his fortune in burning heat or bitter cold, in plenty and in starvation, because of that vital seed of conquest that was in him. He was tough and hard as his father and his father's father before him had been because in his veins the Roman bloodstream had flowed undiluted by the weaker currents of the world.

No wonder Hiram had heard the mocking laughter when the big bombers flew by. Men, not machines, warred upon men. Therein the world never changed. The Italian was a Roman no more, and not a million proclamations could make him so. The Empire dreams of Caesar, of Antony, of Augustus, had been founded upon the men who could carve them out of the flesh and bone of other men. And they were gone - gone. The seed was dead and the blood was thinned. There he was, the Italian of today, enchanting, endearing, artist, easy-going, gay and sunny, loving life and good things, brave enough in his way, but the hungry, restless, roving fighting conqueror? Never! Never again! And his leaders
knew
it.

There was the answer, the answer that Hiram had sought in the musty libraries and museums and among the ruins, and, too, in the street and restaurants of Rome and in the Campagna where the peasants tilled the soil. All the uniforms and the panoply and the machines for war were there, but the urge, the bitter, hungry urge and the strength were not.

Strength! Strength of men! The old sword poured it into Hiram, until he cried aloud with the joy of it. Man's work! What had it to do with pause or fear or reflection, or dalliance by the wayside? One was born but once, and the struggle never ended until the grave.