Literature 4
Literary Supplement
Contents
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass…………………………………………………….
3
Apparently with No Surprise……………………………………………………...
3
Because I Could Not Stop for Death…………………………………………….
4
On This Wondrous Sea…………………………………………………………….
4
Success is Counted Sweetest……………………………………………………
5
Going to Heaven!.............................................................................................
5
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers………………………………………………….
6
There’s a Certain Slant of Light………………………………………………….
6
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain……………………………………………………….
7
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died…………………………………………………
7
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock…………………………………………….
8
In a Station of the Metro……………………………………………………………
11
The Wheelbarrow……………………………………………………………………
12
Mending Wall…………………………………………………………………………
12
The Road Not Taken………………………………………………………………..
13
A Dream Deferred……………………………………………………………………
14
In Just………………………………………………………………………………..
14
maggie and millie and molly and may…………………………………………
15
A Good Man is Hard to Find……………………………………………………..
15
The Snows of Kilimanjaro……………………………………………………….
28
2
Emily Dickinson Poems
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,-When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Apparently with No Surprise
Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.
3
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility
We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
On This Wondrous Sea
On this wondrous sea
Sailing silently,
Ho! Pilot, ho!
Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar -Where the storm is o'er?
In the peaceful west
Many the sails at rest -The anchors fast -Thither I pilot thee -Land Ho! Eternity!
Ashore at last!
4
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated -- dying -On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
Going to Heaven!
Going to Heaven!
I don't know when -Pray do not ask me how!
Indeed I'm too astonished
To think of answering you!
Going to Heaven!
How dim it sounds!
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home at night
Unto the Shepherd's arm!
Perhaps you're going too!
Who knows?
If you should get there first
Save just a little space for me
Close to the two I lost -The smallest "Robe" will fit me
And just a bit of "Crown" -For you know we do not mind our dress
When we are going home -I'm glad I don't believe it
For it would stop my breath -And I'd like to look a little more
At such a curious Earth!
I'm glad they did believe it
5
Whom I have never found
Since the might Autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers
"Hope" is the thing with feathers -That perches in the soul -And sings the tune without the words -And never stops -- at all -And sweetest -- in the Gale -- is heard -And sore must be the storm -That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -I've heard it in the chillest land -And on the strangest Sea -Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb -- of Me.
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -None may teach it -- Any -'Tis the Seal Despair -An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -When it comes, the Landscape listens -Shadows -- hold their breath -When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
6
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading -- treading -- till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -Kept beating -- beating -- till I thought
My Mind was going numb -And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space -- began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing -- then –
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died
I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died -The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -Between the Heaves of Storm -The Eyes around -- had wrung them dry -And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset -- when the King
Be witnessed -- in the Room -I willed my Keepsakes -- Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable -- and then it was
There interposed a Fly --
7
With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz -Between the light -- and me -And then the Windows failed -- and then
I could not see to see --
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot
S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, `` What is it? ''
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
8
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ``Do I dare?'' and, ``Do I dare?''
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-[They will say: ``How his hair is growing thin!'']
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-[They will say: ``But how his arms and legs are thin!'']
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all-The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
9
And I have known the arms already, known them all-Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep. . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: `` I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all''-If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ``That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.''
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
10
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor-And this, and so much more?-It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
``That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.''
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
In a Station of the Metro—Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black, bough.
11
The Wheelbarrow—William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Mending Wall—Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
12
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say '.Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
The Road Not Taken—Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
13
A Dream Deferred—Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
in Just—e.e. cummings
in Justspring
when the world is mudluscious the little lame baloonman
whistles
far
and wee
and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far
and
wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
baloonMan
far
and
wee
whistles
14
maggie and milly and molly and may—e.e. cummings
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
A Good Man Is Hard to Find—Flannery O’Connor
(c)1953, 1954
THE GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her
connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's
mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his
chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here,
Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and
the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The
Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here
what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any
direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the
children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as
a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on
the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of
a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to
take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world
and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."
15
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley,
a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at
home?" He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her
yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother
asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss
something. She has to go everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just remember that the next time you want me
to curl your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her
big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and
underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for
the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too
much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and
accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a
cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of
her. Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at
eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down
because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been
when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting
them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother
still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the
grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the
brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were
white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of
cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on
the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too
cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that
the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out
after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of
the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both
16
sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the
various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of
silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading
comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that
way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy
state too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more
respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right
then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child
standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" she asked and
they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little niggers in the country
don't have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over
the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the
things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her
leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway
smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it,
like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said, pointing it out. "That
was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind," said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the
lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and
would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When
there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the
other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow
and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star
said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
17
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she
told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said
once when she was a maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins
Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a
gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his
initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the
watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and
returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a
nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley's funny
bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said
she wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The
grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was
a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had
died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower was a part stucco
and part wood filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat
man named Red Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the
building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS
BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY
LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a
truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree,
chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back into the tree and got on thehighest limb as
soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the
other and dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the
nickelodeon and Red Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter
than her skin, came and took their order. The children's mother put a dime in the
machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz," and the grandmother said that tune
always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only
glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips made
him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her head
from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play
something she could tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a
fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come
be my little girl?"
"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this
for a minion bucks!" and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
18
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with
these people's order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach
hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down
at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he said.
"You can't win," and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief.
"These days you don't know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old
beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they
worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now
why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in
each hand and one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's
that you can trust," she said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she
repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attact this place right here," said the woman. "If
he hears about it being here,I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two
cent in the cash register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman
went off to get the rest of the order.
"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Every- thing is getting terrible. I
remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no
more."
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion
Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe
acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking
about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and
looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on
himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke
up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and
recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was
a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there
was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side
19
in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled
exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to
lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she
wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing.
"There was a secret panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing
that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when
Sherman came through but it was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and
find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the
house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret
panel!"
"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty
minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the
secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over
her mother's shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun
even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby
began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father
could feel the blows in his kidney.
"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all
shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go
anywhere.
"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything
like this. This is the one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother
directed. "I marked it when we passed."
"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother
recalled other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and
the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the
fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
20
"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window,"
John Wesley suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said. They turned onto the dirt road and the car
raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when
there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey. The dirt road was hilly
and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All
at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles
around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated
trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought
came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her
eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the
valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and
Pitty Sing,the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown
out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car
turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey
remained in the driver's seat with the cat-gray-striped with a broad white face and an
orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of
the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under
the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on
her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the
house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window
against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the
children's mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the
screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've
had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out
of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a
jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch,
except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shaking.
"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one
answered her. Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright
21
blue parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the l shirt. The grandmother
decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on
the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and
dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill,
coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and
waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on
slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top
of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There
were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a
steady expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned
his head and muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat
boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of
it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open
in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray
hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left
side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was
an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silverrimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and
didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him
and was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone
she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him au her life but she
could not recall who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down
the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and
white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. "Good afternoon," he said.
"I see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
"Once"," he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he
said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to
sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together
there where you're at."
"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
22
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their
mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The
Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be
known, "but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized
me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the
children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I
don't reckon he meant to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean
handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then
covered it up again. "I would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look
a bit like you have com- mon blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of
strong white teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's
heart was pure gold," he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around
behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the
ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee," he said. "You know they make me nervous."
He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be
embarrassed as if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky," he
remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call
yourself The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you
and tell "
"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting
in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
"I prechate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt
of his gun.
"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of
it.
23
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you,"
The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he said to Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with
them?"
"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is,"
and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and
he remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods
with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it
fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man.
John Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off
toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and
supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be back in a minute,
Mamma, wait on me!"
"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at
The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she
said desperately. "You're not a bit common!"
"Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her
statement carefully, "but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a
different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some
that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it
is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into every- thing!'" He put on his
black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he were
embarrassed again. "I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before you ladies," he said,
hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we had on when we
escaped and we're just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from
some folks we met," he explained.
"That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his
suitcase."
"I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.
"Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.
"Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He
never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
"You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful
it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about
some- body chasing you all the time."
24
The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking
about it. "Yes'm, somebody is always after you," he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind-his hat
because she was standing up looking down on him. "Do you ever pray?" she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades.
"Nome," he said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The
old lady's head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like
a long satisfied insuck of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
"I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the
arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an
undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a
man burnt alive oncet," and he looked up at the children's mother and the little girl who
were sitting close together, their faces white and their eyes glassy; "I even seen a
woman flogged," he said.
"Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ."
"I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice,
"but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the
penitentiary. I was buried alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a
steady stare.
"That's when you should have started to pray," she said "What did you do to get sent to
the penitentiary that first time?"
"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky.
"Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget
what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I
ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it
never come."
"Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
"Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."
"You must have stolen something," she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a headdoctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for
a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a
thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you
can go there and see for yourself."
25
"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."
"That's right," The Misfit said.
"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a
yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.
"Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed
on his shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt
reminded her of. "No, lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the
crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a
tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and
just be punished for it."
The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her
breath. "Lady," he asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby
Lee and Hiram and join your husband?"
"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was
holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The
Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that
little girl's hand."
"I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."
The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into
the woods after Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not
a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to
tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before
anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will
help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.
"Yes'm," The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the
same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could
prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said,
"they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get
you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know
what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they
match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call
myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I
gone through in punishment."
26
There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does
it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at
all?"
"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I
know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give
you all the money I've got!"
"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body
that give the undertaker a tip."
There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a
parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her
heart would break.
"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He
shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then
it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't,
then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you
can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to
him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was
saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under
her.
"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he
said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been
there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I
would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and
the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to
her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies.
You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The
Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the
chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to
clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down
at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed
under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.
"Take her off and thow her where you shown the others," he said, picking up the cat
that was rubbing itself against his leg.
"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
27
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to
shoot her every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee" The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
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.
This text was scanned and edited on Feb. 2, 1998 by Stefan Pollklas
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.
***
The marvelous 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."
28
"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?"
29
"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 goodness’ 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."
30
"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
31
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 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.
32
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 fastslipping 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."
33
"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 d------ 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 goodness 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 b---," he said. "You rich b----. 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
34
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 marvelous. 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.
35
She shot very well this good, this rich b----, 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 anesthetic 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
36
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 marvelously, 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 marvelous 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
37
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, marvelous
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, evilsmelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the
38
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 quarreled
much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled 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-
39
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.
40
"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 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.
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.
41
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 ParisTours, 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
42
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."
43
"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
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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 glamorous
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 goodness’ 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.
45
"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."
"Amazing," 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."
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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,
47
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 wildebeest, 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 wildebeest were
trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of greenrising 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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