The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (5 page)

They were of all ages and sizes, in groups of from ten to a hundred, herded and chaperoned by efficient-looking females, hawk-faced women who bustled about them with lists in their hands, checking, assisted by men with arm-bands. London was evacuating its children to the country. That was what Hiram Holliday had remembered.

Some were simply clustere
d around the women in charge of
them, others were centred ar
ound standards bearing the name
of their school. Still others had as a c
entre a sign bearing the
names of towns - Exeter
...
Lyme Regis
...
Torquay
...
Newton Abbot, Totnes
...
Polperro

^‘
Ah,' said Hiram Holliday, and began to push his way through the throng. It was even better than he had expected. And he noted the presence of the wonderfully efficient London Bobby, helping to maintain what order there was.

Hiram saw the three Nazi agents appear at a side gate and begin to search the crowd. They were young and powerful and pink-cheeked, three typical bully boys of the New Germany. Hiram noticed with a thrill of genuine pleasure that one of them held his handkerchief to his mouth, and that the handkerchief was red.

There was no time to lose. Hiram and his companions were by a group of some thirty children clustered around a standard reading 'Penzance.' At a word from the girl, the boy moved from her side, and in an instant had mingled with the other children.

But the three Nazis had seen them and began to press forward through the crush, and then stopped unbelieving for a moment as they saw Holliday and the two women deliberately move away some twenty yards and stand there, leaving the boy. The man with the smashed mouth, he was tall, and blond, with an eager, greedy face and a scar that extended slantwise down his cheek to his chin, nodded the other two forward, and they closed in again.

'Now steady!' said Hiram Holliday, and slipped his arm around the girl's waist. With the other hand he gripped the wrist of the trembling nurse.' This may be hard. But no villains in the world can buck this combination.'

The girl gave a little moan because one of the three already had his hand on one of the boy's arms, and the man with the smashed mouth was reaching for the other, when the thing happened. The woman in charge of the group was as lean and spare as a greyhound. She had the face of a bald-headed eagle, and a voice like a calliope.

'Here! I say! Stop that!' she shouted. 'What are you doing? How dare you! Leave that child alone. He belongs to me. Help! Police! Kidnappers!' A sailor, with
H.M.S. Courageous
on his hat-band, passing, stopped and took in the scene, and then suddenly hit the man with the smashed mouth a resounding thump with his shoulder, and said: 'Now then, 'Any, not so fast. What's it all abaht ? The lydy says it ain't your young 'un. Got a German look abaht you, ain't you ?'

Two enormous blue-helmeted policemen began to move inexorably towards the scene. Hiram relaxed his grip around the girl's waist, but she remained pressed close to him. Three Territorials in khaki had stopped by the group and one said: 'Wot's this abaht Germans ?'

'Help!' screeched the woman. 'They're trying to steal my child.'

'Oh, no they ain't,' said the soldier. 'Tyke the other two, boys, I'll tend to this one.' But the three had broken and were thrusting through the crowd headed for the exits, with the Bobbies, the soldiers and the sailors in pursuit. Whistles shrilled frantically....

'Lovely, wasn't it?' said Hiram Holliday and chuckled. He did not notice that the girl was looking at him with misty eyes. 'Come on. They're moving.'

A man with an arm-band had taken the group in tow and was steering them into a carriage, eight to a compartment. Hiram noticed that the eagle-faced lady, flushed and triumphant, had Peter by the hand with a firm grip. Hiram and the girl waved to him, and he turned around and laughed back at them. Then Holliday and the girl and the nurse got into the car at the other end and stood in the corridor, Hiram keeping an eye on the platform. A uniformed guard challenged him. Holliday reached into his inner breast pocket and pulled forth the contents of envelopes and bills and folded papers, and said: 'It's all right. I've got all the papers for everyone.' The guard, satisfied, passed on. Far up front, an engine gave three maniacal shrieks, there was a terrific jolt and then the train slowly crawled out of Paddington Station, south-bound into the night, bearing its cargo of children towards safety.

There remained the retrieving of Peter, which was accomplished more easily than Hiram had expected. They waited until past Reading, and then invaded the compartment in which Peter and the eagle-faced lady were sitting. The girl was a magnificent actress and the boy was clever. It apparently was a meeting between lost child and mother. Hiram explained that they had become separated in the crush. The teacher was unwilling and suspicious because the girl and the boy were talking in German. 'Madame,' said Hiram, 'if you will consult your lists and make a count, I am sure you will find that you have an extra child.'

The check-up proved this immediately. The woman let him go, snapping a word of warning
:'
You ought to be more careful, madame. Three men tried to make away with him while he was with
me....'

The girl turned astonished eyes on her, and for the first time
Holliday noted that they wer
e a deep violet in colour. 'How
dreadful,' she said. 'Thank
you so much for your care of my
little boy '

They went back and actually found room in a compartment.

'What is your name?' asked Holliday.

The girl turned and looked at him gravely. He had time now to see how exquisite she was, fragile and dainty, with hair the colour of strained honey. She answered him.

'My name is Heidi.'

'Who are you, Heidi?'

She bent her head so that he could not see her face. She said in a very low voice:
'I
...
I am Heidi. Will you be hurt if I do not tell you more, you who have been so good and kind?'

'No,' said Hiram Holliday. 'No. I am happy, very happy. I have never been so happy in my life.' Heidi suddenly closed her eyes and buried her face in

Hiram's arm. In a few minutes she was asleep with the child cuddled to her and the silent nurse sitting stark upright. Hiram, who had been consulting maps, woke them as the train slowed to come into Totnes. 'We get off here,' he said.

They followed him unquestioningly. 'We are still forty miles from our destination,' said Holliday. 'But I think we ought to leave the train. Just in case they have arranged for a delegation, you know. Though I rather think, being literal minded as so many Germans are, they will head directly for Penzance. Still
...'

Heidi slipped her hand into his. 'We will go with you.'

They found a taxi to take them up the long hill into the little walled city where they found the Castle Inn still open, and an enraged proprietor complaining of the never-ceasing telephone bell - people from London calling up for accommodations. The backwash of the panic was lapping at the walls of the tiny South Devon town.

Holliday inquired the name of the best hotel in Plymouth and put a trunk call through to the night porter. When he came out of the booth, he was grinning. He consulted his watch. It was just after midnight. 'In five hours,' he said to Heidi, 'you will be on your way to Paris. The s.s.
Bordeaux
of the French Line was due to call at Plymouth, bound for le Havre at eight tomorrow morning. Because of the war scare, they've pushed her up. The tender leaves at four in the morning. We'll get a car and leave here around two. I want you to sleep until then.'

While the three slept, Holliday went out and woke the night man in the garage, and arranged for a car to drive them to Plymouth. It was one o'clock when he walked up the hill of the medieval town, passing beneath the old clock bridge, back to the hotel. He was nearly there when, with a rush and a roar, a huge car charged up the hill past him, and then with a scream of brakes pulled up in front of the inn.

'Oh, oh!' said Hiram Holliday,
'I
don't believe it. It only happens in books.' Nevertheless he stepped into a shop doorway shaded by the overhang of an Elizabethan balconade.

'Hallo.... Hallo
...'
a voice cried from the car.... 'Iss anyone up?'

The proprietor came grumbling to the door and peered out.

'Hallo!' said the voice. 'Are we on se road for Penzance ?'

'Well, now ye do be little off of it,' came the reply in broad Devon. 'Go straight on till ye get to Kingsbridge and take the Plymouth turn. Ye'll pick up the main road. But you do be still a hunder and twenty mile from where ye be goin'.'

The crash of gears and the revved engine rang through the sleeping town, and the big car leaped off and disappeared around the corner leaving Hiram Holliday shuddering quietly. There had been five men in the car. The street lamp had shone plainly on the man in the back in the middle. It was the German with the scar. He had a large piece of sticking plaster across his upper lip.

'That,' said Hiram Holliday
to himself, as he waited until
the sound of the car had died awa
y, 'is what you get for being a
dramatic ass and not leaving
well enough alone. You had the
game won, and then you
had to pull the Escape from the
Train, and the Midnight Flight through the Countryside. I
will try to remember that. It
is only the dramatic people who get into trouble
'

He saw no need to inform Heidi of what had happened.

They drove, jammed together in a tiny Morris, through the high, twisting Devon lanes, on the back roads to Plymouth. Once Heidi had suddenly begun to laugh hysterically and

cry 'Oh, no,
no....
No. You fought them with your

umbrella.... With an umbrella '

Holliday, embarrassed, glanced at the thing, still crooked over one arm, but the girl stopped laughing as suddenly as she had started, and said with the same wonderful tones in her voice that he had heard when she had defied the sky:
'Ach

nein
No, no. It is not an umbrella. It is a shining sword.'

And she took it suddenly from his arm and pressed her lips to the crook of the handle that was the hilt, with a gesture that Hiram suddenly knew was many, many hundreds of years old.

And once when he had told her his name she just sat and
repeated it over and over a
gain: 'Hiram Holliday.... Hiram
Holliday Hiram Holliday '

And finally they drove up to the Southern Railway Docks in Plymouth, where the tender was preparing to leave for the s.s.
Bordeaux
where she lay in the Sound, beyond the Hoe, outlined by her own lights, and Hiram Holliday with a little catch in his throat because the adventure was ended, said:' Goodbye, Heidi. And good luck in Paris - and everywhere.'

The girl stood for a moment with both hands on his shoulders looking into his round, old-young face. She said: 'Goodbye, Hiram Holliday. Thank you. I do not think perhaps our ways will ever cross again, but I at least have known a great and gallant man. There are not many left. Goodbye, my dear.' She slipped her arms about his neck and kissed his lips, and Hiram had his reward. Then she and the child went aboard the tender. But the thing that sent a little cold chill down his spine was the behaviour of the nurse. She came to him and took his right hand with her head bowed and slightly inclined. And as she carried it to her lips, she bent her knee to him in a quick, curious curtsy.

The tender emitted three sharp blasts and cast off. Hiram Holliday stood on the dock and waved to the three until they were out of sight, and then turned and walked slowly and wearily away, a very lonely, misshapen figure in a mackintosh and turned-up soft hat, with an umbrella crooked over his arm.

He went to the Grand Hotel and slept until nine and then caught the ten o'clock train back to London. He had bought some English magazines to read on the way back. He was looking at a copy of the
Sketch,
a periodical devoted to Society and sport, but left it open on his lap as the express roared through a station, and he caught the name - 'Totnes,' and all the fantastic, impossible happenings of the night before came flooding back to him. He had fought against Nazi agents in a park in London for an unknown girl, with an umbrella, helped her to escape something he was not sure he even believed, and had nearly run her right back into them again.... He sighed and shook his head, and turned the page and felt his heart stop. It was a full-length reproduction of an oil portrait, and staring at him were Heidi, and the boy Peter. She was seated in a high-backed, crested chair, with the boy curled at her feet.