The Adventures of Hiram Holliday Read Free Page B

horizon, but at first they remained unnoticed by Holliday because he was ranging London like a hound.
    He drank in the city with his eyes and his ears, he took in the unforgettable scent of London into his blood through his nostrils, he soaked in the feel of the old, old city through his finger-tips and the pores of his skin. He was feverish with the turmoil of the millions of voices that called to him from every crooked street and bowed window.
    He left the smart West End with its glittering shops and crested windows and walked down the grey, dusty alleys of the back streets. He walked through the City and rubbed elbows with the clerks and bank runners in their shiny silk hats. He wandered through the musty Law Courts, down Chancery Lane, and through Temple Bar, and felt, as he passed, all the weight of the machinery of British justice on his shoulders.
    He went down to the Pool on the Thames and stood amongst the rusty ships and breathed in the heavy odours of tea and coffee and a hundred spices and read the exciting names on the bows of the vessels. He walked through Limehouse down where the grey river bent itself into Limehouse Reach and drank mild and bitter in the wonderfully redolent pubs. The first night he climbed to the top of Hampstead Heath,' 'appy 'Ampstead,' that he had read about and sat with the billion beckoning lights of London at his feet and listened to the distant surf-roar of the city, and then walked for hours through quiet streets past the two-storied red-brick houses, and let his imagination play on what lay behind the shaded windows.
    He learned the Strand and Fleet Street with its wonderful, intriguing old courtyards to be gained through narrow, grimy alleys, and tasted the tang and excitement of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. He sought out names that he knew, Padding-ton and Waterloo Stations, and went and stood there and smelled the English soft coal smell and read the names on the train boards - Torquay, Paignton, Plymouth, Land's End, Brighton, Harwich, Paris.'...
    Westminster Abbey, that fantastic jumble of the bones and relics of England's great, that charnel house of history, was almost unbearable to Holliday because of the sensations of ancient times that fought for possession of his body and his mind. He felt like a switchboard through which a mill ion calls were thronging, but he could hardly tear himself away from the walks and old flagstones of the Tower of London because there he walked with a breed of men and women that somehow he felt had passed from the earth, and who still, he knew, were in their feelings and ambitions as of the people of his day.
    The tiny tower that housed the globules of coloured light known as the Crown Jewels frightened him because of the passion and greed he felt draping the collection like a mantle, but he stayed for hours in the armoury of old weapons and let his fingers wander over the ashen shafts of ancient tilting spears and closed his hand over the pommels of the great two-handed swords, and felt the tough, truculent presence of the great, tawny men of centuries past who had had the strength and the will to swing them. He heard old cries and lamentations in the dungeons and once he passed through a zone of terror, and found that he was at the place where a girl named Jane Grey, Queen of England for but a few days, had waited to be killed.
    One clear day, on an impulse, he drove out to Croydon and paid three pounds to a pilot to fly him over London. His fingers itched to be at the wheel, but he said nothing, and feasted his eyes on the illimitable meadows of grey stone, the threading grey worm that was the Thames and the green patches of the great parks. He saw the city below him built upon the mortar of centuries, a cement mixed of dust and blood, and knew that as all things pass, so this city must some day bleed and die again.
    He thought, too, for the first time of bombers, and the coming threat of war, and looking down, he frowned a little and