The Adventures of Hiram Holliday Read Free

because he was pleasant, polite, willing and frequently showed flashes of biting, amusing humour. They didn't even know where he spent his vacations, or when the five-day week came in, his two consecutive days off. The only thing they did know was that for the past three or four years Hiram Holliday had been saving vacation time and money for a trip to Europe. Holliday had been forced by family circumstances to leave college in his third year. By the time his family obligations were lifted and he was free and alone in the world, he had been eight years at the desk. His ways were set. He had never married.
    What no one knew was that outside office hours Hiram Holliday was a gentleman adventurer; that laboriously, with infinite pains and patience, he had in his later years acquired all of the outward attributes of the romantic hero. The inner ones he had always possessed. They were his inescapable antidote to the bitterness, the cruelty, the disillusionment, the harshness and ridiculousness of the world that is known to the newspaperman, the world in which there are no heroes, chivalry is dead, and the good deed is figured strictly on the percentage basis. The more idols that crumbled beneath the lead of his copy pencil, the more he learned of greed, selfishness and human rapacity, the more he yearned for selfless heroism, honesty and gallantry, the quest of beauty for beauty's sake, the love of humanity for its frailty, the cult of decency, the aura of fearlessness. The world was the most wonderfully exciting thing that had ever happened, the fantastic spinning ball that he was allowed to inhabit for his span of years, and his reading was devoted to devouring its history. He knew that if he could ever reach those far-off places where history had been made that the very stones and objects that had felt the touch of the people of the past would tell him things, would help to slake his great thirst to be one with, to understand this world which heretofore practically had existed for him only through the eyes of others.
    He had known for many years of his extraordinary sensitivity to objects that had been in close connexion with people. It was simply a sensitivity magnified to a high degree, the same thing that enables a house-hunting person to walk into a dwelling for sale, or for rent, and say: 'This feels like a happy house. Let's stay here.' Hiram Holliday's life was a constant straining to co-ordinate and visualize the impressions of others. He had the true copy-reader's contempt for the careless or incomplete reporter, but in addition he actually suffered mental agonies at the lack of human insight in the stories he read, in the failure of this or that reporter to include the one touch that would make the event understandable to all. It was as if he had been given a book in which was all the information about the world in which he lived, only to find when he went to it for instruction or relief that half the pages were missing.
    His physical attributes were even more amazing. He was, as has been said, a gentleman adventurer who would never go adventuring, but who played at it, instead, and let the play serve as an anodyne for his imagination, his longing and the dullness of a vocation into which he had been trapped by circumstances.
    He learned to do the things that make men men, many old things they had had to do to survive, before the days when it was all done for them, and new things too. He went to fencing salle and shooting school and took lessons in foil, epee and sabre, pistol and rifle. He never forgot the thrill when his pistol instructor had told him: 'The first thing, if you've got to get into a gun fight, is to gain twenty-five yards. The average man with a pistol in his hand at twenty-five yards might just as well be holding a rock.' The very language enchanted him.
    Because of starting late in life, and his physical attributes, he could become a champion at none of these things, but he learned to do them well