ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Premium Edition. Ernest Hemingway
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Название: ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Premium Edition
Автор: Ernest Hemingway
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066499457
isbn:
“Well,” said the telegrapher, “what do you carry a bird around for?”
“Bird?” asked Scripps. “What bird?”
“That bird that’s sticking out of your shirt.” Scripps was at a loss. What sort of chap was this telegrapher? What sort of men went in for telegraphy? Were they like composers? Were they like artists? Were they like writers? Were they like the advertising men who write the ads in our national weeklies? Or were they like Europeans, drawn and wasted by the war, their best years behind them? Could he tell this telegrapher the whole story? Would he understand?
“I started home,” he began. “I passed the Mancelona High School—”
“I knew a girl in Mancelona,” the telegrapher said. “Maybe you knew her. Ethel Enright.”
It was no good going on. He would cut the story short. He would give the bare essentials. Besides, it was beastly cold. It was cold standing there on the wind-swept station platform. Something told him it was useless to go on. He looked over at the deer lying there in a pile, stiff and cold. Perhaps they, too, had been lovers. Some were bucks and some were does. The bucks had horns. That was how you could tell. With cats it is more difficult. In France they geld the cats and do not geld the horses. France was a long way off.
“My wife left me,” Scripps said abruptly.
“I don’t wonder if you go around with a damn bird sticking out of your shirt,” the telegrapher said.
“What town is this?” Scripps asked. The single moment of spiritual communion they had had, had been dissipated. They had never really had it. But they might have. It was no use now. It was no use trying to capture what had gone. What had fled.
“Petoskey,” the telegrapher replied.
“Thank you,” Scripps said. He turned and walked into the silent, deserted Northern town. Luckily, he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He had sold a story to George Horace Lorimer just before he had started out with his old woman on that drinking trip. Why had he gone at all? What was it all about, anyway?
Coming toward him down the street came two Indians. They looked at him, but their faces did not change. Their faces remained the same. They went into McCarthy’s barber shop.
CHAPTER FIVE
Scripps O’Neil stood irresolutely before the barber shop. Inside there men were being shaved. Other men, no different, were having their hair cut. Other men sat against the wall in tall chairs and smoked, awaiting their turn in the barber chairs, admiring the paintings hung on the wall, or admiring their own reflections in the long mirror. Should he, Scripps, go in there? After all, he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He could go where he wanted. He looked, once again, irresolutely. It was an inviting prospect, the society of men, the warm room, the white jackets of the barbers skillfully snipping away with their scissors or drawing their blades diagonally through the lather that covered the face of some man who was getting a shave. They could use their tools, these barbers. Somehow, it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted something different. He wanted to eat. Besides, there was his bird to look after.
Scripps O’Neil turned his back on the barber shop and strode away up the street of the silently frozen Northern town. On his right, as he walked, the weeping birches, their branches bare of leaves, hung down to the ground, heavy with snow. To his ears came the sound of sleigh bells. Perhaps it was Christmas. In the South little children would be shooting off firecrackers and crying “Christmas Gift! Christmas Gift!” to one another. His father came from the South. He had been a soldier in the rebel army. ’Way back in Civil War days. Sherman had burned their house down on his March to the Sea. “War is hell,” Sherman had said. “But you see how it is, Mrs. O’Neil. I’ve got to do it.” He had touched a match to the white-pillared old house.
“If General O’Neil were here, you dastard!” his mother had said, speaking in her broken English, “you’d never have touched a match to that house.”
Smoke curled up from the old house. The fire was mounting. The white pillars were obscured in the rising smoke-wreaths. Scripps had held close to his mother’s linsey-woolsey dress.
General Sherman climbed back onto his horse and made a low bow. “Mrs. O’Neil,” he said, and Scripps’s mother always said there were tears in his eyes, even if he was a damned Yank. The man had a heart, sir, even if he did not follow its dictates. “Mrs. O’Neil, if the general were here, we could have it out as man to man. As it is, ma’am, war being what it is, I must burn your house.”
He motioned to one of his soldiers, who ran forward and threw a bucket of kerosene on the flames. The flames rose and a great column of smoke went up in the still evening air.
“At least, General Sherman,” Scripps’s mother said triumphantly, “that column of smoke will warn the other loyal daughters of the Confederacy that you are coming.”
Sherman bowed. “That is the risk we must take, ma’am.” He clapped spurs to his horse and rode away, his long white hair floating on the wind. Neither Scripps nor his mother ever saw him again. Odd that he should think of that incident now. He looked up. Facing him was a sign:
BROWN’S BEANERY THE BEST BY
TEST
He would go in and eat. This was what he wanted. He would go in and eat. That sign:
THE BEST BY TEST
Ah, these big beanery owners were wise fellows. They knew how to get the customers. No ads in The Saturday Evening Post for them. The Best by Test. That was the stuff. He went in.
Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?
“I wonder,” Scripps asked an elderly waitress who came in through the swinging door from the kitchen, “if you could tell me if this is Brown’s Beanery?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the waitress. “The best by test.”
“Thank you,” Scripps said. He sat down at the counter. “I would like to have some beans for myself and some for my bird here.”
He opened his shirt and placed the bird on the counter. The bird ruffled his feathers and shook himself. He pecked inquiringly at the catsup bottle. The elderly waitress put out a hand and stroked him. “Isn’t he a manly little fellow?” she remarked. “By the way,” she asked, a little shamefacedly, “what was it you ordered, sir?”
“Beans,” Scripps said, “for my bird and myself.”
The waitress shoved up a little wicket that led into the kitchen. Scripps had a glimpse of a warm, steam-filled room, with big pots and kettles, and many shining cans on the wall.
“A pig and the noisy ones,” the waitress called in a matter-of-fact voice into the open wicket. “One for a bird!”
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