The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- Editor's
Note:
This short story -- written in 1938 --
reflects several of Hemingway's personal concerns during the 1930s regarding
his existence as a writer and his life in general. Hemingway remarked in Green
Hills that "politics, women, drink, money and ambition" damage
American writers. His fear that his own acquaintances with rich people might
harm his integrity as a writer becomes evident in this story. The text in
italics also reveals Hemingway's fear of leaving his own work of life
unfinished.
In broader terms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro should be viewed as an example of an author of the "Lost Generation", who experienced the world wars and the war in Spain, which led them to question moral and philosophy. Hemingway, in particular, found himself in a moral vacuum when he felt alienated from the church, which was closely affiliated with Franco in Spain, and which he felt obliged to distance himself from. As a result, he came up with his own code of human conduct: a mixture of hedonism and sentimental humanism.
In broader terms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro should be viewed as an example of an author of the "Lost Generation", who experienced the world wars and the war in Spain, which led them to question moral and philosophy. Hemingway, in particular, found himself in a moral vacuum when he felt alienated from the church, which was closely affiliated with Franco in Spain, and which he felt obliged to distance himself from. As a result, he came up with his own code of human conduct: a mixture of hedonism and sentimental humanism.
This text was scanned and edited on
Feb. 2, 1998 by Stefan Pollklas
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Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered
mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa.
Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of
God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a
leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
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The Snows of Kilimanjaro
by Ernest
Hemingway
THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S
painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."
"Is it really?"
"Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry
about the odor though. That must bother you."
"Don't! Please don't."
"Look at them," he said.
"Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"
The cot the man lay on was in the wide
shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of
the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the
sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
"They've been there since the day
the truck broke down," he said. "Today's the first time any have lit
on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I
ever wanted to use them in a story. That's funny now.""I wish you
wouldn't," she said.
"I'm only talking," he said.
"It's much easier if I talk. But I don't want to bother you."
"You know it doesn't bother
me," she said. "It's that I've gotten so very nervous not being able
to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane
comes."
"Or until the plane doesn't
come."
"Please tell me what I can do.
There must be something I can do.
"You can take the leg off and that
might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me. You're a good shot now.
I taught you to shoot, didn't I?"
"Please don't talk that way.
Couldn't I read to you?"
"Read what?"
"Anything in the book that we
haven't read."
"I can't listen to it," he
said." Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time
pass."
"I don't quarrel. I never want to
quarrel. Let's not quarrel any more. No matter how nervous we get. Maybe they
will be back with another truck today. Maybe the plane will come."
"I don't want to move," the
man said. "There is no sense in moving now except to make it easier for
you."
"That's cowardly."
"Can't you let a man die as
comfortably as he can without calling him names? What's the use of clanging
me?"
"You're not going to die."
"Don't be silly. I'm dying now.
Ask those bastards." He looked over to where the huge, filthy birds sat,
their naked heads sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run
quick-legged and then waddle slowly toward the others.
"They are around every camp. You
never notice them. You can't die if you don't give up."
"Where did you read that? You're
such a bloody fool."
"You might think about some one
else."
"For Christ's sake," he said,
"that's been my trade."
He lay then and was quiet for a while
and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There
were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far
off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a
pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a
nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
"Wouldn't you like me to
read?" she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot.
"There's a breeze coming up.
"No thanks."
"Maybe the truck will come."
"I don't give a damn about the
truck."
"I do."
"You give a damn about so many
things that I don't."
"Not so many, Harry."
"What about a drink?"
"It's supposed to be bad for you.
It said in Black's to avoid all alcohol.
You shouldn't drink."
"Molo!" he shouted.
"Yes Bwana."
"Bring whiskey-soda."
"Yes Bwana."
"You shouldn't," she said.
"That's what I mean by giving up. It says it's
bad for you. I know it's bad for
you."
"No," he said. "It's
good for me."
So now it was all over, he thought. So
now he would never have a chance
to finish it. So this was the way it
ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since
the gangrene started in his right leg
he had no pain and with the pain the
horror had gone and all he felt now was
a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was
coming, he had very little curiosity.
For years it had obsessed him; but now
it meant nothing in itself. It was
strange how easy being tired enough
made it.
Now he would never write the things
that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he
would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never
write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he
would never know, now.
"I wish we'd never come," the
woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip.
"You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said
you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I'd have gone
anywhere. I said I'd go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could
have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable."
"Your bloody money," he said.
"That's not fair," she said.
"It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went
wherever you wanted to go and I've done what you wanted to do But I wish we'd
never come here."
"You said you loved it."
"I did when you were all right.
But now I hate it. I don't see why that had to happen to your leg. What have we
done to have that happen to us?"
"I suppose what I did was to
forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn't pay any
attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was
probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out
that paralyzed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene." He
looked at her, "What else'"
"I don't mean that."
"If we would have hired a good
mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil
and never burned out that bearing in the truck."
"I don't mean that."
"If you hadn't left your own
people, your goddamned Old Westbury Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on
" *'Why, I loved you. That's not fair. I love you now. I'll always love
you Don't you love me?"
"No," said the man. "I
don't think so. I never have."
"Harry, what are you saying?
You're out of your head."
"No. I haven't any head to go out
of."
"Don't drink that," she said.
"Darling, please don't drink that. We have to do everything we can."
"You do it," he said.
"I'm tired."
Now in his mind he saw a railway
station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the
headlight of the Simplon-Offent cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace
then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with,
in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the
mountains in Bulgaffa and Nansen's Secretary asking the old man if it were snow
and the old man looking at it and saying, No, that's not snow. It's too early
for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It's not
snow and them all saying, It's not snow we were mistaken. But it was the snow
all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations.
And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.
It was snow too that fell all Christmas
week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived in the woodcutter's
house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they
slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came with
his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they
gave him woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had
drifted over.
In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow
was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube and saw
every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the
sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills,
skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the
Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder
and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a
bird.
They were snow-bound a week in the
Madlenerhaus that time in the blizzard playing cards in the smoke by the
lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more.
Finally he lost it all. Everything, the Skischule money and all the season's
profit and then his capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up
the cards and then opening, "Sans Voir." There was always
gambling then. When there was no snow you gambled and when there was too much
you gambled. He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling.
But he had never written a line of
that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the mountains showing across
the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers'
leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered
Barker afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how
quiet it got and then somebody saying, ''You bloody murderous bastard.''
Those were the same Austrians they
killed then that he skied with later. No not the same. Hans, that he skied with
all that year, had been in the Kaiser Jagers and when they went hunting hares
together up the little valley above the saw-mill they had talked of the
fighting on Pasubio and of the attack on Perticara and Asalone and he had never
written a word of that. Nor of Monte Corona, nor the Sette Communi, nor of
Arsiero.
How many winters had he lived in the
Vorarlberg and the Arlberg? It was four and then he remembered the man who had
the fox to sell when they had walked into Bludenz, that time to buy presents,
and the cherry-pit taste of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of running
powder-snow on crust, singing ''Hi! Ho! said Rolly!' ' as you ran down the last
stretch to the steep drop, taking it straight, then running the orchard in
three turns and out across the ditch and onto the icy road behind the inn.
Knocking your bindings loose, kicking the skis free and leaning them up against
the wooden wall of the inn, the lamplight coming from the window, where inside,
in the smoky, new-wine smelling warmth, they were playing the accordion.
"Where did we stay in Paris?"
he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas chair, now, in Africa.
"At the Crillon. You know
that."
"Why do I know that?"
"That's where we always
stayed."
"No. Not always."
"There and at the Pavillion
Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there."
"Love is a dunghill," said
Harry. "And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow."
"If you have to go away," she
said, "is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?
I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and
your wife and burn your saddle and your armour?"
"Yes," he said. "Your
damned money was my armour. My Sword and my Armour."
"Don't."
"All right. I'll stop that. I
don't want to hurt you.'
"It's a little bit late now."
"All right then. I'll go on
hurting you. It's more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked to do with
you I can't do now."
"No, that's not true. You liked to
do many things and everything you wanted to do I did."
"Oh, for Christ sake stop
bragging, will you?"
He looked at her and saw her crying.
"Listen," he said. "Do
you think that it is fun to do this? I don't know why I'm doing it. It's trying
to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started
talking. I didn't mean to start this, and now I'm crazy as a coot and being as
cruel to you as I can be. Don't pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I
love you, really. You know I love you. I've never loved any one else the way I
love you."
He slipped into the familiar lie he
made his bread and butter by.
"You're sweet to me."
"You bitch," he said.
"You rich bitch. That's poetry. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry.
Rotten poetry."
"Stop it. Harry, why do you have
to turn into a devil now?"
"I don't like to leave
anything," the man said. "I don’t like to leave things behind."
* * *
It was evening now and he had been
asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there was a shadow all across the
plain and the small animals were feeding close to camp; quick dropping heads
and switching tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the bush now.
The birds no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched heavily in a
tree. There were many more of them. His personal boy was sitting by the bed.
"Memsahib's gone to shoot,"
the boy said. "Does Bwana want?"
"Nothing."
She had gone to kill a piece of meat
and, knowing how he liked to watch the game, she had gone well away so she would
not disturb this little pocket of the plain that he could see. She was always
thoughtful, he thought. On anything she knew about, or had read, or that she
had ever heard.
It was not her fault that when he went
to her he was already over. How could a woman know that you meant nothing that
you said; that you spoke only from habit and to be comfortable? After he no
longer meant what he said, his lies were more successful with women than when
he had told them the truth.
It was not so much that he lied as that
there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he
went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of
the same places, and some new ones.
You kept from thinking and it was all
marvellous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to
pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you
cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it.
But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the
very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that
you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one
who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of
not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability
and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The
people he knew now were all much more comfortable when he did not work. Africa
was where he had been happiest in the good time of his life, so he had come out
here to start again. They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort.
There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could
get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his
soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to
burn it out of his body.
She had liked it. She said she loved
it. She loved anything that was exciting, that involved a change of scene,
where there were new people and where things were pleasant. And he had felt the
illusion of returning strength of will to work. Now if this was how it ended,
and he knew it was, he must not turn like some snake biting itself because its
back was broken. It wasn't this woman's fault. If it had not been she it would
have been another. If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it. He heard a
shot beyond the hill.
She shot very well this good, this rich
bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had
destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept
him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself
and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions,
by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and
by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway?
It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was
never what he had done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make
his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was strange,
too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should
always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love,
when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all,
who had all the money there was, who had had a husband and children, who had
taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly as a
writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that
when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give
her more for her money than when he had really loved.
We must all be cut out for what we do,
he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold
vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not
too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out
but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that,
although it was well worth writing.
Now she came in sight, walking across
the open toward the camp. She was wearing jodphurs and carrying her rifle. The
two boys had a Tommie slung and they were coming along behind her. She was
still a good-looking woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant body. She had a
great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her
face, she read enormously, liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank
too much. Her husband had died when she was still a comparatively young woman
and for a while she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did
not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses,
to books, and to bottles. She liked to read in the evening before dinner and
she drank Scotch and soda while she read. By dinner she was fairly drunk and
after a bottle of wine at dinner she was usually drunk enough to sleep.
That was before the lovers. After she
had the lovers she did not drink so much because she did not have to be drunk
to sleep. But the lovers bored her. She had been married to a man who had never
bored her and these people bored her very much.
Then one of her two children was killed
in a plane crash and after that was over she did not want the lovers, and drink
being no anaesthetic she had to make another life. Suddenly, she had been
acutely frightened of being alone. But she wanted some one that she respected
with her.
It had begun very simply. She liked
what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led. She thought he did
exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way
in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular
progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away
what remained of his old life.
He had traded it for security, for
comfort too, there was no denying that, and for what else? He did not know. She
would have bought him anything he wanted. He knew that. She was a damned nice
woman too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one; rather with her,
because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appreciative and
because she never made scenes. And now this life that she had built again was
coming to a term because he had not used iodine two weeks ago when a thorn had
scratched his knee as they moved forward trying to photograph a herd of
waterbuck standing, their heads up, peering while their nostrils searched the
air, their ears spread wide to hear the first noise that would send them
rushing into the bush. They had bolted, too, before he got the picture.
Here she came now. He turned his head
on the cot to look toward her. "Hello," he said.
"I shot a Tommy ram," she told
him. "He'll make you good broth and I'll have them mash some potatoes with
the Klim. How do you feel?"
"Much better."
"Isn't that lovely? You know I
thought perhaps you would. You were sleeping when I left."
"I had a good sleep. Did you walk
far?"
"No. Just around behind the hill.
I made quite a good shot on the Tommy."
"You shoot marvellously, you
know."
"I love it. I've loved Africa.
Really. If you're all right it's the most fun that I've ever had. You don't
know the fun it's been to shoot with you. I've loved the country."
"I love it too."
"Darling, you don't know how
marvellous it is to see you feeling better. I couldn't stand it when you felt
that way. You won't talk to me like that again, will you? Promise me?"
"No," he said. "I don't
remember what I said."
"You don't have to destroy me. Do
you? I'm only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want
to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't want to
destroy me again, would you?"
"I'd like to destroy you a few
times in bed," he said.
"Yes. That's the good destruction.
That's the way we're made to be destroyed. The plane will be here
tomorrow."
"How do you know?"
"I'm sure. It's bound to come. The
boys have the wood all ready and the grass to make the smudge. I went down and
looked at it again today. There's plenty of room to land and we have the
smudges ready at both ends."
"What makes you think it will come
tomorrow?"
"I'm sure it will. It's overdue
now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we will have some good
destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind."
"Should we have a drink? The sun
is down."
"Do you think you should?"
"I'm having one."
"We'll have one together. Molo, letti
dui whiskey-soda!" she called.
"You'd better put on your mosquito
boots," he told her.
"I'll wait till I bathe . .
."
While it grew dark they drank and just
before it was dark and there was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena
crossed the open on his way around the hill.
"That bastard crosses there every
night," the man said. "Every night for two weeks."
"He's the one makes the noise at
night. I don't mind it. They're a filthy animal though."
Drinking together, with no pain now
except the discomfort of lying in the one position, the boys lighting a fire,
its shadow jumping on the tents, he could feel the return of acquiescence in
this life of pleasant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been cruel
and unjust in the afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just
then it occurred to him that he was going to die.
It came with a rush; not as a rush of
water nor of wind; but of a sudden, evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing
was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.
"What is it, Harry?" she
asked him.
"Nothing," he said. "You
had better move over to the other side. To windward."
"Did Molo change the
dressing?"
"Yes. I'm just using the boric
now."
"How do you feel?"
"A little wobbly."
"I'm going in to bathe," she
said. "I'll be right out. I'll eat with you and then we'll put the cot in."
So, he said to himself, we did well to
stop the quarrelling. He had never quarrelled much with this woman, while with
the women that he loved he had quarrelled so much they had finally, always,
with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He had
loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
He thought about alone in
Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in Paris before he had gone out. He
had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to
kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one,
the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill
it ... How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him
go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like
her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to
lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him
miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could
not cure himself of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club, cold sober,
and mailed it to New York asking her to write him at the of fice in Paris. That
seemed safe. And that night missing her so much it made him feel hollow sick
inside, he wandered up past Maxim's, picked a girl up and took her out to
supper. He had gone to a place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly,
and left her for a hot Armenian slut, that swung her belly against him so it almost
scalded. He took her away from a British gunner subaltern after a row. The
gunner asked him outside and they fought in the street on the cobbles in the
dark. He'd hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw and when he didn't go
down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then beside
his eye. He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on him and
grabbed his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice behind the
ear and then smashed him with his right as he pushed him away. When the gunner
went down his head hit first and he ran with the girl because they heard the
M.P. 's coming. They got into a taxi and drove out to Rimmily Hissa along the
Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night and went to bed and she felt
as over-ripe as she looked but smooth, rose-petal, syrupy, smooth-bellied,
big-breasted and needed no pillow under her buttocks, and he left her before
she was awake looking blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the
Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his coat because one sleeve was missing.
That same night he left for Anatolia
and he remembered, later on that trip, riding all day through fields of the
poppies that they raised for opium and how strange it made you feel, finally,
and all the distances seemed wrong, to where they had made the attack with the
newly arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a god-damned thing, and
the artillery had fired into the troops and the British observer had cried like
a child.
That was the day he'd first seen dead
men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them. The
Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and
the of ficers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the
British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of
the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the
Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could
never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to
Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And
there in the cafe as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in
front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada
movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore
a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now
he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home,
the office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the
one he'd written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the hand
writing he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another.
But his wife said, ''Who is that letter from, dear?'' and that was the end of
the beginning of that.
He remembered the good times with them
all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the
quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had
never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one
and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had
always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He
had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of
them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he
could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he
had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
"How do you feel?" she said.
She had come out from the tent now after her bath.
"All right."
"Could you eat now?" He saw
Molo behind her with the folding table and the other boy with the dishes.
"I want to write," he said.
"You ought to take some broth to
keep your strength up."
"I'm going to die tonight,"
he said. "I don't need my strength up."
"Don't be melodramatic, Harry,
please," she said.
"Why don't you use your nose? I'm
rotted half way up my thigh now. What the hell should I fool with broth for?
Molo bring whiskey-soda."
"Please take the broth," she
said gently.
"All right."
The broth was too hot. He had to hold
it in the cup until it cooled enough to take it and then he just got it down
without gagging.
"You're a fine woman," he
said. "Don't pay any attention to me."
She looked at him with her well-known,
well-loved face from Spur and Town & Country, only a little
the worse for drink, only a little the worse for bed, but Town & Country
never showed those good breasts and those useful thighs and those lightly
small-of-back-caressing hands, and as he looked and saw her well-known pleasant
smile, he felt death come again.
in.
This time there was no rush. It was a
puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall.
"They can bring my net out later
and hang it from the tree and build the fire up. I'm not going in the tent
tonight. It's not worth moving. It's a clear night. There won't be any
rain."
So this was how you died, in whispers
that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could
promise that. The one experience that he had never had he was not going to
spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn't.
"You can't take dictation, can
you?"
"I never learned," she told
him.
"That's all right."
There wasn't time, of course, although
it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one
paragraph if you could get it right.
There was a log house, chinked white
with mortar, on a hill above the lake. There was a bell on a pole by the door
to call the people in to meals. Behind the house were fields and behind the
fields was the timber. A line of lombardy poplars ran from the house to the
dock. Other poplars ran along the point. A road went up to the hills along the
edge of the timber and along that road he picked blackberries. Then that log
house was burned down and all the guns that had been on deer foot racks above
the open fire place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with the lead
melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of
ashes that were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked
Grandfather if you could have them to play with, and he said, no. You see they
were his guns still and he never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any more.
The house was rebuilt in the same place out of lumber now and painted white and
from its porch you saw the poplars and the lake beyond; but there were never
any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the
wall of the log house lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever
touched them.
In the Black Forest, after the war, we
rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk to it. One was down the
valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shade of the trees that
bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills
past many small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road
crossed the stream. That was where our fishing began.
The other way was to climb steeply up
to the edge of the woods and then go across the top of the hills through the
pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and down across this meadow to
the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was not big, but narrow,
clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the birches. At
the Hotel in Triberg the proprietor had a fine season. It was very pleasant and
we were all great friends. The next year came the inflation and the money he
had made the year before was not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and
he hanged himself. You could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place
Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the
dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the
women, always drunk on wine and bad mare; and the children with their noses
running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at
the Cafe' des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above. The
concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge,
his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose
husband was a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the cremerie when she
had opened L'Auto and seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his
first big race. She had blushed and laughed and then gone upstairs crying with
the yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband of the woman who ran the Bal
Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early plane the husband
knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of white wine at
the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors in that quarter
then because they all were poor.
Around that Place there were two kinds;
the drunkards and the sportifs. The drunkards killed their
poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exercise. They were the
descendants of the Communards and it was no struggle for them to know their
politics. They knew who had shot their fathers, their relatives, their
brothers, and their friends when the Versailles troops came in and took the
town after the Commune and executed any one they could catch with calloused
hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other sign he was a working man. And
in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie
Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do.
There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling
trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of
the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the
sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the
other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran
up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the
only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with the
high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died. There
were only two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the
top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his
writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills
of Paris.
From the apartment you could only see
the wood and coal man's place. He sold wine too, bad wine. The golden horse's
head outside the Boucherie Chevaline where the carcasses hung yellow gold and
red in the open window, and the green painted co-operative where they bought
their wine; good wine and cheap. The rest was plaster walls and the windows of
the neighbors. The neighbors who, at night, when some one lay drunk in the
street, moaning and groaning in that typical French ivresse that you were
propaganded to believe did not exist, would open their windows and then the
murmur of talk.
''Where is the policeman? When you
don't want him the bugger is always there. He's sleeping with some concierge.
Get the Agent. " Till some one threw a bucket of water from a window and
the moaning stopped. ''What's that? Water. Ah, that's intelligent." And
the windows shutting. Marie, his femme de menage, protesting against
the eight-hour day saying, ''If a husband works until six he gets only a riffle
drunk on the way home and does not waste too much. If he works only until five
he is drunk every night and one has no money. It is the wife of the working man
who suffers from this shortening of hours. '
"Wouldn't you like some more broth?"
the woman asked him now.
"No, thank you very much. It is
awfully good."
"Try just a little."
"I would like a
whiskey-soda."
"It's not good for you."
"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter
wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for
me."
"You know I like you to
drink."
"Oh yes. Only it's bad for
me."
When she goes, he thought, I'll have
all I want. Not all I want but all there is. Ayee he was tired. Too tired. He
was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It
must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved
absolutely silently on the pavements.
No, he had never written about Paris.
Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never
written?
What about the ranch and the silvered
gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and
the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle
in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow
moving mass raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the
mountains, the clear sharpness of the peak in the evening light and, riding
down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley. Now he
remembered coming down through the timber in the dark holding the horse's tail
when you could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.
About the half-wit chore boy who was
left at the ranch that time and told not to let any one get any hay, and that
old bastard from the Forks who had beaten the boy when he had worked for him
stopping to get some feed. The boy refusing and the old man saying he would
beat him again. The boy got the rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he
tried to come into the barn and when they came back to the ranch he'd been dead
a week, frozen in the corral, and the dogs had eaten part of him. But what was
left you packed on a sled wrapped in a blanket and roped on and you got the boy
to help you haul it, and the two of you took it out over the road on skis, and
sixty miles down to town to turn the boy over. He having no idea that he would
be arrested. Thinking he had done his duty and that you were his friend and he
would be rewarded. He'd helped to haul the old man in so everybody could know
how bad the old man had been and how he'd tried to steal some feed that didn't
belong to him, and when the sheriff put the handcuffs on the boy he couldn't believe
it. Then he'd started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write. He knew
at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?
"You tell them why," he said.
"Why what, dear?"
"Why nothing."
She didn't drink so much, now, since
she had him. But if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now.
Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they
played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He
remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a
story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me."
And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was
not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when
he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that
wrecked him.
He had been contemptuous of those who
wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat
anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.
All right. Now he would not care for
death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as
well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had
something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him,
the pain had stopped.
He remembered long ago when Williamson,
the bombing officer, had been hit by a stick bomb some one in a German patrol
had thrown as he was coming in through the wire that night and, screaming, had
begged every one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good officer,
although addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire,
with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when
they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For
Christ sake shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our Lord never
sending you anything you could not bear and some one's theory had been that
meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had
always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson until
he gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use himself
and then they did not work right away.
Still this now, that he had, was very
easy; and if it was no worse as it went on there was nothing to worry about.
Except that he would rather be in better company.
He thought a little about the company
that he would like to have.
No, he thought, when everything you do,
you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still
there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess
now.
I'm getting as bored with dying as with
everything else, he thought.
"It's a bore," he said out
loud.
"What is, my dear?"
"Anything you do too bloody
long."
He looked at her face between him and
the fire. She was leaning back in the chair and the firelight shone on her
pleasantly lined face and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the hyena
make a noise just outside the range of the fire.
"I've been writing," he said.
"But I got tired."
"Do you think you will be able to
sleep?"
"Pretty sure. Why don't you turn
in?"
"I like to sit here with
you."
"Do you feel anything
strange?" he asked her.
"No. Just a little sleepy."
"I do," he said.
He had just felt death come by again.
"You know the only thing I've
never lost is curiosity," he said to her.
"You've never lost anything.
You're the most complete man I've ever known."
"Christ," he said. "How
little a woman knows. What is that? Your intuition?"
Because, just then, death had come and
rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.
"Never believe any of that about a
scythe and a skull," he told her. "It can be two bicycle policemen as
easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena."
It had moved up on him now, but it had
no shape any more. It simply occupied space.
"Tell it to go away."
It did not go away but moved a little
closer.
"You've got a hell of a
breath," he told it. "You stinking bastard."
It moved up closer to him still and now
he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could not speak it came a little
closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on
him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he
could not move or speak, he heard the woman say, "Bwana is asleep now.
Take the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent."
He could not speak to tell her to make
it go away and it crouched now, heavier, so he could not breathe. And then,
while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from
his chest.
It was morning and had been morning for
some time and he heard the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide
circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on
grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the
morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low
this time, and then glided down and levelled off and landed smoothly and,
coming walking toward him, was old Compton in slacks, a tweed jacket and a
brown felt hat.
"What's the matter, old
cock?" Compton said.
"Bad leg," he told him.
"Will you have some breakfast?"
"Thanks. I'll just have some tea.
It's the Puss Moth you know. I won't be able to take the Memsahib. There's only
room for one. Your lorry is on the way."
Helen had taken Compton aside and was
speaking to him. Compton came back more cheery than ever.
"We'll get you right in," he
said. "I'll be back for the Mem. Now I'm afraid I'll have to stop at
Arusha to refuel. We'd better get going."
"What about the tea?"
"I don't really care about it, you
know."
The boys had picked up the cot and
carried it around the green tents and down along the rock and out onto the
plain and along past the smudges that were burning brightly now, the grass all
consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult
getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was
stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat. Compton started
the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter
moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for
warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with
the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp
beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and
the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry
waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra,
small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed dots seeming to climb
as they moved in long fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow
came toward them, they were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the
plain as far as you could see, gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie's tweed
back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeeste
were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of
green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the heavy forest
again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped
down and then another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and
Compie looking back to see how he was riding. Then there were other mountains
dark ahead.
And then instead of going on to Arusha
they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down
he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the
first snow in at ii blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts
were coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to
the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so
thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and
Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could
see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun,
was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was
going.
Just then the hyena stopped whimpering
in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound. The
woman heard it and, stirred uneasily. She did not wake. In her dream she was at
the house on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter's debut.
Somehow her father was there and he had been very rude. Then the noise the
hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did not know where she was
and she was very afraid. Then she took the flashlight and shone it on the other
cot that they had carried in after Harry had gone to sleep. She could see his
bulk under the mosquito bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out and it hung
down alongside the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could not look
at it.
"Molo," she called,
"Molo! Molo!"
Then she said, "Harry,
Harry!" Then her voice rising, "Harry! Please. Oh Harry!"
There was no answer and she could not
hear him breathing.
Outside the tent the
hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear
him for the beating of her heart.
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