Short Stories Read online

  The Ultimate Ernest Hemingway

  Short Stories

  Ernest Hemingway

  CONTENTS

  The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

  The Capital of the World

  The Snows of Kilimanjaro

  Old Man at the Bridge

  On the Quai at Smyrna

  Indian Camp

  The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife

  The End of Something

  The Three-Day Blow

  The Battler

  A Very Short Story

  Soldier’s Home

  The Revolutionist

  Mr. And Mrs. Elliot

  Cat in the Rain

  Out of Season

  Cross-Country Snow

  My Old Man

  Big Two-Hearted River, Part I

  Big Two-Hearted River, Part II

  The Undefeated

  In Another Country

  Hills Like White Elephants

  The Killers

  Che Ti Dice La Patria?

  Fifty Grand

  A Simple Enquiry

  Ten Indians

  A Canary for One

  An Alpine Idyll

  A Pursuit Race

  Today is Friday

  Banal Story

  Now I Lay Me

  After the Storm

  A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

  The Light of the World

  God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen

  The Sea Change

  A Way You’ll Never Be

  The Mother of a Queen

  One Reader Writes

  Homage to Switzerland

  A Day’s Wait

  A Natural History of the Dead

  Wine of Wyoming

  The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio

  Fathers and Sons

  The Denunciation

  The Butterfly and the Tank

  Night Before Battle

  Under the Ridge

  Three Shots

  The Indians Moved Away

  The Last Good Country

  Crossing the Mississippi

  Night Before Landing

  “Nick Sat Against the Wall . . .”

  Summer People

  Wedding Day

  On Writing

  About the Series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

  It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

  “Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked.

  “I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him.

  “I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said.

  “I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. “Tell him to make three gimlets.”

  The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.

  “What had I ought to give them?” Macomber asked.

  “A quid would be plenty,” Wilson told him. “You don’t want to spoil them.”

  “Will the headman distribute it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade.

  “You’ve got your lion,” Robert Wilson said to him, “and a damned fine one too.”

  Mrs. Macomber looked at Wilson quickly. She was an extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had, five years before, commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing, with photographs, a beauty product which she had never used. She had been married to Francis Macomber for eleven years.

  “He is a good lion, isn’t he?” Macomber said. His wife looked at him now. She looked at both these men as though she had never seen them before.

  One, Wilson, the white hunter, she knew she had never truly seen before. He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the corners that grooved merrily when he smiled. He smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole.

  “Well, here’s to the lion,” Robert Wilson said. He smiled at her again and, not smiling, she looked curiously at her husband.

  Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome. He was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new, he was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward.

  “Here’s to the lion,” he said. “I can’t ever thank you for what you did.”

  Margaret, his wife, looked away from him and back to Wilson.

  “Let’s not talk about the lion,” she said.

  Wilson looked over at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.

  “It’s been a very strange day,” she said. “Hadn’t you ought to put your hat on even under the canvas at noon? You told me that, you now.

  “Might put it on,” said Wilson.

  “You know you have a very red face, Mr. Wilson,” she told him and smiled again.

  “Drink,” said Wilson.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Francis drinks a great deal, but his face is never red.”

  “It’s red today,” Macomber tried a joke.

  “No,” said Margaret. “It’s mine that’s red today. But Mr. Wilson’s is always red.”

  “Must be racial,” said Wilson. “I say, you wouldn’t like to drop my beauty as a topic, would you?”

  “I’ve just started on it.”

  “Let’s chuck it,” said Wilson.

  “Conversation is going to be so difficult,” Margaret said.

  “Don’t be silly, Margot,” her husband said.

  “No difficulty,” Wilson said. “Got a damn fine lion.”

  Margot looked at them both and they both saw that she was going to cry. Wilson had seen it coming for a long time and he dreaded it. Macomber was past dreading it.

  “I wish it hadn’t happened. Oh, I wish it hadn’t happened,” she said and started for her tent. She made no noise of crying but they could see that her shoulders were shaking under the rose-colored, sun-proofed shirt she wore.

  “Women
upset,” said Wilson to the tall man. “Amounts to nothing. Strain on the nerves and one thing’n another.”

  “No,” said Macomber. “I suppose that I rate that for the rest of my life now.”

  “Nonsense. Let’s have a spot of the giant killer,” said Wilson. “Forget the whole thing. Nothing to it anyway.”

  “We might try,” said Macomber. “I won’t forget what you did for me though.”

  “Nothing,” said Wilson. “All nonsense.”

  So they sat there in the shade where the camp was pitched under some wide-topped acacia trees with a boulder-strewn cliff behind them, and a stretch of grass that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream in front with forest beyond it, and drank their just-cool lime drinks and avoided one another’s eyes while the boys set the table for lunch. Wilson could tell that the boys all knew about it now and when he saw Macomber’s personal boy looking curiously at his master while he was putting dishes on the table he snapped at him in Swahili. The boy turned away with his face blank.

  “What were you telling him?” Macomber asked.

  “Nothing. Told him to look alive or I’d see he got about fifteen of the best.”

  “What’s that? Lashes?”

  “It’s quite illegal,” Wilson said. “You’re supposed to fine them.”

  “Do you still have them whipped?”

  “Oh, yes. They could raise a row if they chose to complain. But they don’t. They prefer it to the fines.”

  “How strange!” said Macomber.

  “Not strange, really,” Wilson said. “Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?”

  Then he felt embarrassed at asking it and before Macomber could answer he went on, “We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”

  This was no better. “Good God,” he thought. “I am a diplomat, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, we take a beating,” said Macomber, still not looking at him. “I’m awfully sorry about that lion business. It doesn’t have to go any further, does it? I mean no one will hear about it will they?”

  ‘‘‘You mean will I tell it at the Mathaiga Club?” Wilson looked at him now coldly. He had not expected this. So he’s a bloody four-letter man as well as a bloody coward, he thought. I rather liked him too until today. But how is one to know about an American?

  “No,” said Wilson. “I’m a professional hunter. We never talk about our clients. You can be quite easy on that. It’s supposed to be bad form to ask us not to talk though.”

  He had decided now that to break would be much easier. He would eat, then, by himself and could read a book with his meals. They would eat by themselves. He would see them through the safari on a very formal basis—what was it the French called it? Distinguished consideration—and it would be a damn sight easier than having to go through this emotional trash. He’d insult him and make a good clean break. Then he could read a book with his meals and he’d still be drinking their whisky. That was the phrase for it when a safari went bad. You ran into another white hunter and you asked, “How is everything going?” and he answered, “Oh, I’m still drinking their whisky,” and you knew everything had gone to pot.

  “I’m sorry,” Macomber said and looked at him with his American face that would stay adolescent until it became middle-aged, and Wilson noted his crew-cropped hair, fine eyes only faintly shifty, good nose, thin lips and handsome jaw. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that. There are lots of things I don’t know.”

  So what could he do, Wilson thought. He was all ready to break it off quickly and neatly and here the beggar was apologizing after he had just insulted him. He made one more attempt. “Don’t worry about me talking,” he said. “I have a living to make: You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.”

  “I bolted like a rabbit,” Macomber said.

  Now what in hell were you going to do about a man who talked like that, Wilson wondered.

  Wilson looked at Macomber with his flat, blue, machine-gunner’s eyes and the other smiled back at him. He had a pleasant smile if you did not notice how his eyes showed when he was hurt.

  “Maybe I can fix it up on buffalo,” he said. “We’re after them next, aren’t we?”

  “In the morning if you like,” Wilson told him. Perhaps he had been wrong. This was certainly the way to take it. You most certainly could not tell a damned thing about an American. He was all for Macomber again. If you could forget the morning. But, of course, you couldn’t. The morning had been about as bad as they come.

  “Here comes the Memsahib,” he said. She was walking over from her tent looking refreshed and cheerful and quite lovely. She had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid. But she wasn’t stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid.

  “How is the beautiful red-faced Mr. Wilson? Are you feeling better, Francis, my pearl?”

  “Oh, much,” said Macomber.

  “I’ve dropped the whole thing,” she said, sitting down at the table. “What importance is there to whether Francis is any good at killing lions? That’s not his trade. That’s Mr. Wilson’s trade. Mr. Wilson is really very impressive killing anything. You do kill anything, don’t you?”

  “Oh, anything,” said Wilson. “Simply anything.” They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

  “We’re going after buff in the morning,” he told her.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Oh, yes, I am. Mayn’t I, Francis?”

  “Why not stay in camp?”

  “Not for anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss something like today for anything.”

  When she left, Wilson was thinking, when she went off to cry, she seemed a hell of a fine woman. She seemed to understand, to realize, to be hurt for him and for herself and to know how things really stood. She is away for twenty minutes and now she is back, simply enamelled in that American female cruelty. They are the damnedest women. Really the damnedest.

  “We’ll put on another show for you tomorrow,” Francis Macomber said.

  “You’re not coming,” Wilson said.

  “You’re very mistaken,” she told him. “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.”

  “Here’s the lunch,” said Wilson. “You’re very merry, aren’t you?”

  “Why not? I didn’t come out here to be dull.”

  “Well, it hasn’t been dull,” Wilson said. He could see the boulders in the river and the high bank beyond with the trees and he remembered the morning.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s been charming. And tomorrow. You don’t know how I look forward to tomorrow.”

  “That’s eland he’s offering you,” Wilson said.

  “They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they?”

  “I suppose that describes them,” Wilson said.

  “It’s very good meat,” Macomber said.

  “Did you shoot it, Francis?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not dangerous, are they?”

  “Only if they fall on you,” Wilson told her.

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Why not let up on the bitchery just a little, Margot,” Macomber said, cutting the eland steak and putting some mashed potato, gravy and carrot on the down-turned fork that tined through the piece of meat.

 
; “I suppose I could,” she said, “since you put it so prettily.”

  “Tonight we’ll have champagne for the lion,” Wilson said. “It’s a bit too hot at noon.”

  “Oh, the lion,” Margot said. “I’d forgotten the lion!”

  So, Robert Wilson thought to himself, she is giving him a ride, isn’t she? Or do you suppose that’s her idea of putting up a good show? How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism.

  “Have some more eland,” he said to her politely.

  That afternoon, late, Wilson and Macomber went out in the motor car with the native driver and the two gun-bearers. Mrs. Macomber stayed in the camp. It was too hot to go out, she said, and she was going with them in the early morning. As they drove off Wilson saw her standing under the big tree, looking pretty rather than beautiful in her faintly rosy khaki, her dark hair drawn back off her forehead and gathered in a knot low on her neck, her face as fresh, he thought, as though she were in England. She waved to them as the car went off through the swale of high grass and curved around through the trees into the small hills of orchard bush.