The Adventures of Hiram Holliday by Paul Gallico Page A

find her, to be there when she should need him again. And thus as he ranged the cobbled streets and twisted alleys of the ancient baroque city, his eyes were searching constantly for the small, brave, white face, and his ears were ever attuned to catch the sound of her faint cry for help.
    The plane that brought him from Paris to Prague had descended through rain and mist to land, and it had rained ever since. Rain lay over Prague in an enveloping cloak, glistening from the streets, enhancing the mystery of the towered churches and fortresses, changing their shapes, making them loom larger and more menacing and mysterious, just as the curtain of romanticism had fallen over his own mind. Sometimes the spiny towers of the old Tyn Church on the Market Place, opposite the still more ancient City Hall, vanished into the grey, boiling mists, and then his imagination was uncapped, and he visioned them as topless and ever rising.
    After the wonderful bronze and copper shades of Paris and her pastel flower-beds and pale blue autumn skies, Prague was grey, and drab, and heavy, and depressed. The shapes of the more modern houses reminded him of barracks, and the massive masonry of the medieval piles weighed him down. Windows were slits in ancient walls three feet thick, and iron-barred. It was the face of Heidi that he kept envisioning behind them. For all its modernity Prague was a city of fairy towers and ogre's dungeons, of old walls, and dormers, casement and embrasure, of postern, wicket- and lych-gate. Arthur Rackham, or Edmond Dulac, who had illustrated the fairy tales Holliday had read as a child, might have conceived it. And Heidi was a blood Princess, and in that other world into which he was leaning too much, princesses languished in towers.
    Hiram felt gloomy and depressed in Prague because he was so acutely sensitive to the gloom and depression of the inhabitants. Searching around in his mind for a comparison, he decided that all the people in Prague somehow resembled the rag-tag of the off-streets of New York, like First and Second Avenues. There was no colour or life in them, or in their clothing, or their bearing, or very little hope either. A little taxi-driver who spoke English said to him: 'What is the good ? They have give us our liv es and take away our freedom. The German, he can liff without a soul, but not we Czechs.'
    Yes, Hiram had felt, that was the difference. London and Paris sprang back into gaiety, lights, laughter, dancing, music, and joy, when the cloud had passed. He thought he understood, perhaps for the first time, why men are willing to die for freedom. Later, when he reviewed in his mind the things he did in Prague, and the absurd passage with the Man with the False Beard, he could realize how profoundly disturbed he had been by the weight of misery and the emotional drag that lay over the city. Because his antidote, more than ever, had been his queer, coloured imagination that yearned for the high and gallant adventure that transcends all the cheerless misery of truth.
    He had climbed to the great grey fortress on the left bank of the Moldau, the Hradcany, and there wandered through rain and fog down the Street of the Alchemists, an old, old, tired alley with tiny, tired houses, built into the masonry of the fortress wall, houses that leaned to one another for support, the aged leaning upon the aged. With his mind he peopled them with the fusty-bearded alchemists at their cauldrons and crucibles, and the bare, deserted, rain-drenched streets he dressed with spurred and belted bravoes trailing their long swords. He himself felt as though he wore at his belt the long, basket-hiked rapier of Toledo steel, and once at a window, a tiny dormer under a roof so low he could have touched it with his hand, he was sure he saw the lovely, hunted face of Heidi, and heard her cry: ‘ A moi, Hiram, a moi.' But there was nothing at the window but rain streaks on the pane, and no sound but the old grating and