By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 5

  Inside the inn Bill Bird and I found the proprietor and his wife sitting at a table eating soup.

  “Please can we get two double rooms?” Bill asked.

  The proprietor’s wife started to answer and the proprietor glared at her while onion soup dribbled through his mustache.

  “You can’t get rooms here to-day or to-morrow or any other time, Auslanders,” he snarled.

  “Herr Trinckler in Triberg recommended us to come here for the fishing,” Bill said trying to mollify him.

  “Trinckler?” His lower lip reached up and swept a ration of onion soup out of the mustache. “Trinckler, eh? Trinckler is not the man who runs this place.” He went back to the soup.

  Bill and I each had a wife out in the clearing. Said wives had begun to be hungry about four miles back on the trail over the mountain. I, myself, was so hungry that my stomach was beginning to rumble and turn over on itself. Bill is built on the lean and graceful lines of an early Italian primitive. Any food he eats shows up on him at once like an ostrich swallowing a baseball. He looked leaner than ever. So we were very polite.

  “We are very hungry,” Bill said, and I can state he looked it. “How far is it to the next gasthaus?”

  The proprietor pounded on the table. “You’ll have to find that out for yourselves.”

  We found it at the end of four miles of hot, white road and it wasn’t much to look at. Like most Schwarzwald inns it was named Gasthaus zum Roessle or Inn of the Pony. The pony is the favorite symbol of the Black Forest inn keeper but there are plenty of Adlers (Eagles) and Sonnes (Suns).

  All these inns are white plastered and clean looking outside and uniformly neat and dirty inside. The sheets are short, the feather beds are lumpy and the mattresses are bright red, the beer is good, the wine is bad, dinner is at noon, you have to select your piece of black bread carefully to make sure you are missing a sour one, the proprietor never understands what you say, his wife twists her apron strings and shakes her head, there are workmen with their suspenders over their undershirts eating hunks of black bread they carve off the loaf with a pocket knife and wash down with sour wine, the beams of the ceiling are dark and smoky, chickens scratch in the front yard and the manure pile smokes below the bedroom windows.

  The particular pony inn we stopped at had all these attributes and a few more. It had a good meal of fried veal, potatoes, lettuce salad and apple pie, served by the proprietor who looked as stolid as an ox and sometimes stopped with a plate of soup in his hand to stare vacantly out of the window. His wife had a face like a camel. That particular lift of the head and look of utter stupidity that belongs only to the bactrian and the South German peasant woman.

  It was a hot day outside but the inn was cool and dim and we ate a big dinner with our rucksacks piled in a corner. A table of Germans in the corner kept glancing over at us. When we were on the second bottle of beer and the last of the wash-bowl full of salad, a tall, dark-haired woman came over to our table and asked us if we were not speaking English.

  That was not very hard to answer and it developed that she was an American singer studying opera in Berlin. She looked about forty-five, but like all good singers she had at last discovered that all her life she had been on the wrong track, had been the victim of bad teachers and now she was at last on the right track. Elsa Sembry was teaching her and she was really teaching her. It was Sembry’s great secret. Something about the glottis or the epiglottis. I could not make out quite which. But it makes all the difference in the world. You depress one and elevate the other and that is all there is to it.

  Mrs. Hemingway and Mrs. Bird went upstairs into one of the little white-washed rooms to go to sleep on the squeaky beds after their 15-mile walk, Mrs. Hemingway’s and Mrs. Bird’s walk, not the bed’s walk; and Bill and I went on down the road to find the town of Oberprechtal and try to get fishing licenses. We were sitting in front of the Gasthaus zur Sonne engaged in an intense conversation with the proprietor, which was proceeding very well as long as I kept my German out of it, when the singer appeared. She was carrying a notebook under her arm. She was in a confiding mood.

  Her voice, it seemed—you understand she was telling us all this in the absolutely impersonal manner with which all singers discuss their voices—was a coloratura soprano that had been favorably compared with Melba’s and Patti’s.

  “Gatti-Casazza said I needed just a little more seasoning,” she explained. “That’s why I’m here. But you ought to hear me trill”—she trilled softly and through her nose. “I never thought much of Galli-Curci. She’s not really a singer, you know. Listen to this.” She trilled again, a little louder and a little more through her nose. I was impressed. I had never heard anyone trill so softly through their nose or so loudly and clearly through their nose. It was an experience.

  She then told us that Mary Garden could not sing, that Yvonne Gall was a bum, that Tetrazzini was a washout, that Mabel Garrison was a flat tire. After demolishing these impostors she again spoke in a cool impersonal manner of her own indistinguishability from Patti and Melba. We then went back up the road to our inn.

  At dinner that night we ran into our second example of German nastiness—and there have only been two examples encountered in two weeks in the Black Forest. The trip isn’t over yet but those are plenty.

  Our table was set for five, the singer had joined us, and when we came into the dining-room of the inn to sit down we found there were two blonde-haired Germans sitting at the end of the table placed very close to ours. To avoid disturbing them my wife walked all the way around the table. They then changed their seats and Mrs. Bird had to walk all the way around the other side of the table. While we were eating they kept up a fire of comment in German on us auslanders. Then they got up to go. They started to come past our end of the table and I stood up and moved my chair forward to let them by. The space was too narrow. There was a perfectly clear way for them to get out around the other end of the table. Instead, they grabbed my chair and pushed it. I stood up and let them through, and have regretted it ever since.

  Early in married life I discovered that the secret of marital happiness did not lie in engaging in brawls in a public house.

  “We are Germans,” announced one of the two sneeringly.

  “Du bist ein schweinhund,” which was undoubtedly ungrammatical but seemed understandable. Bill grabbed a bottle by the neck. It looked like the beginning of an international incident.

  They stood in the door a minute, but the odds evidently looked too even and workingmen at the next table seemed to be siding with us.

  “Schieber!” one of them said, looking up at the two sport-clothed, round heads in the door. “Schieber” means profiteer.

  The door closed. They went out.

  “If only I could speak German,” I lamented. “It is bad to possess a fairly extensive vocabulary and to have a feeling of being dumb when someone is cursing you out.”

  “Do you know what you ought to have said to them?” said the singer, in an instructive manner. “You ought to have asked them, ‘Who won the war?’ Or have said, ‘Yes, it is easy to see that you are Germans.’ I wish that I had thought to say the things I thought of.”

  That continued for some time. Then she began to trill. She trilled a great many operas while we sat in the smoky inn. However, that night we all went out walking up the road between the black pine hills with a thin finger-nail paring of a moon in the sky, and the singer stepped in a puddle. The next morning the singer had a hoarse voice and she couldn’t sing very well. But she did the best she could at demonstrating the use of glottis to Mrs. Bird and the rest of us all went fishing.

  A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight

  The Toronto Daily Star • SEPTEMBER 9, 1922

  STRASBOURG, FRANCE.—We were sitting in the cheapest of all the cheap restaurants that cheapen that very cheap and noisy street, the Rue des Petits Champs in Paris.

  We were Mrs. Hemingway, William E. Nash, Mr. Nash’s little brother, and myself. Mr
. Nash announced, somewhere between the lobster and the fried sole, that he was going to Munich the next day and was planning to fly from Paris to Strasbourg. Mrs. Hemingway pondered this until the appearance of the rognons sautés aux champignons, when she asked, “Why don’t we ever fly anywhere? Why is everybody else always flying and we always staying home?”

  That being one of those questions that cannot be answered by words, I went with Mr. Nash to the office of the Franco-Rumanian Aero Company and bought two tickets, half price for journalists, for 120 francs, good for one flight from Paris to Strasbourg. The trip is ten hours and a half by best express train, and takes two hours and a half by plane.

  My natural gloom at the prospect of flying, having flown once, was deepened when I learned that we flew over the Vosges mountains and would have to be at the office of the company, just off the Avenue de l’Opera, at five o’clock in the morning. The name Rumanian in the title of the firm was not encouraging, but the clerk behind the counter assured me there were no Rumanian pilots.

  At five o’clock the next morning we were at the office. We had to get up at four, pack and dress and wake up the proprietor of the only taxi in the neighborhood by pounding on his door in the dark, to make it. The proprietor augments his income by doubling at nights as an accordion player in a bal musette and it took a stiff pounding to wake him.

  While he changed a tire we waited in the street and joked with the boy who runs the charcuterie at the corner and who had gotten up to meet the milkman. The grocery boy made us a couple of sandwiches, told us he had been a pilot during the war, and asked me about the first race at Enghien. The taxi driver asked us into his house to have a drink of coffee, being careful to enquire if we preferred white wine, and with the coffee warming us and munching the paté sandwiches, we drove in state down the empty, grey, early morning streets of Paris.

  The Nashes were waiting at the office for us, having lugged two heavy suitcases a couple of miles on foot because they did not know any taxi drivers personally. The four of us rode out to Le Bourget, the ugliest ride in Paris, in a big limousine and had some more coffee in a shed there outside the flying field. A Frenchman in an oily jumper took our tickets, tore them in two and told us that we were going in two different planes. Out of the window of the shed we could see them standing, small, silver-painted, taut and shining in the early morning sun in front of the airdrome. We were the only passengers.

  Our suitcase was stowed aboard under a seat beside the pilot’s place. We climbed up a couple of steps into a stuffy little cabin and the mechanic handed us some cotton for our ears and locked the door. The pilot climbed into his seat back of the enclosed cock-pit where we sat, a mechanic pulled down on the propeller and the engine began to roar. I looked around at the pilot. He was a short little man, his cap backwards on his head, wearing an oil stained sheep-skin coat and big gloves. Then the plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air.

  We headed almost straight east of Paris, rising in the air as though we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted slowly by some giant, and the ground began to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand cubist painting.

  Sometimes we came down quite low and could see bicyclists on the road looking like pennies rolling along a narrow white strip. At other times we would lift up and the whole landscape would contract. Always we were bounded by a smoky, purple horizon that made all the earth look flat and uninteresting. And always there was the strong, plugged-out roaring, the porthole windows to look out of, and back of us the open cock-pit with the bridge of the pilot’s broad nose and his sheep-skin coat visible with his dirty glove moving the joy stick from side to side or up and down.

  We went over great forests, that looked as soft as velvet, passed over Bar le Duc and Nancy, grey red-roofed towns, over St. Mihiel and the front and in an open field I could see the old trenches zig-zagging through a field pocked with shell holes. I shouted to Mrs. Hemingway to look out but she didn’t seem to hear me. Her chin was sunk forward into the collar of her new fur coat that she had wanted to christen with a plane trip. She was sound asleep. Five o’clock had been too much.

  Beyond the old 1918 front we ran into a storm that made the pilot fly close down to the ground and we followed a canal that we could see below us through the rain. Then after a long stretch of flat, dull looking country we crossed the foot hills of the Vosges that seemed to swell up to meet us and moved over the forest covered mountains that looked as though they rose up and fell away under the plane in the misty rain.

  The plane headed high out of the storm into the bright sunlight and we saw the flat, treelined, muddy ribbon of the Rhine off on our right. We climbed higher, made a long, left turn and a fine long swoop down that brought our hearts up into our mouths like falling in an elevator and then just as we were above the ground zoomed up again, then settled in another swoop and our wheels touched, bumped, and then we were roaring along the smooth flying field up to the hangar like any motorcycle.

  There was a limousine to meet us to take us in to Strasbourg and we went in to the passenger shed to wait for the other plane. The man at the bar asked us if we were going to Warsaw. It was all very casual and very pleasant. An annoying smell of castor oil from the engine had been the only drawback. Because the plane was small and fast and because we were flying early in the morning, there had been no airsickness.

  “When did you have your last accident?” I asked the man back of the refreshment bar.

  “The middle of last July,” he said. “Three killed.”

  But that very morning in the south of France a slow moving pilgrim train had slipped back from the top of a steep grade and telescoped itself on another train climbing the grade, making matchwood of two coaches and killing over thirty people. There had been a big falling off in business on the Paris-Strasbourg line after the July accident. But the same number of people seem to ride on railway trains.

  German Inflation

  The Toronto Daily Star • SEPTEMBER 19, 1922

  KEHL, GERMANY—The boy in a Strasbourg motor agency where we went to make some enquiries about crossing the frontier, said, “Oh yes. It is easy to get over into Germany. All you have to do is go across the bridge.”

  “Don’t you need any visa?” I said.

  “No. Just a permit stamp to go from the French.” He took his passport out of his pocket and showed the back covered with rubber stamps. “See? I live there now because it is so much cheaper. It’s the way to make money.”

  It is all right.

  It is a three-mile street car ride from the centre of Strasbourg out to the Rhine and when you get to the end of the line the car stops and everyone piles out to herd into a long picket-fenced pen that leads to the bridge. A French soldier with a fixed bayonet loafs back and forth across the road and watches the girls in the passport pen from under his steel blue helmet. There is an ugly brick custom house at the left of the bridge and a wooden shed at the right where the French official sits behind a counter and stamps passports.

  The Rhine is swift, yellow and muddy, runs between low, green banks, and swirls and sucks at the concrete abutments of the long, iron bridge. At the other end of the bridge you see the ugly little town of Kehl looking like some dreary section of Dundas [Toronto].

  If you are a French citizen with a French passport the man back of the counter simply stamps your passport “sortie Pont de Kehl” and you go across the bridge into occupied Germany. If you are a citizen of some other of the allied countries the official looks at you suspiciously, asks you where you are from, what you are going to Kehl for, how long you are going to stay, and then stamps your passport with the same sortie. If you should happen to be a citizen of Kehl who has been in Strasbourg on business and is returning to dinner—and as Kehl’s interests are bound up in Strasbourg’s as all suburbs are to the city they are atta
ched to, you would be bound to have to go to Strasbourg on business if you had any kind of business at all—you are held in line for fifteen to twenty minutes, your name is looked up in a card index to see if you have ever spoken against the French regime, your pedigree taken, questions put to you and finally you too are given the same old sortie. Everyone can cross the bridge but the French make it very nasty for the Germans.

  Once across the muddy Rhine you are in Germany, and the German end of the bridge is guarded by a couple of the meekest and most discouraged looking German soldiers you have ever seen. Two French soldiers with fixed bayonets walk up and down and the two German soldiers, unarmed, lean against a wall and look on. The French soldiers are in full equipment and steel helmets, but the Germans wear the old loose tunics and high peaked, peace-time caps.

  I asked a Frenchman the functions and duties of the German guard.

  “They stand there,” he answered.

  There were no marks to be had in Strasbourg, the mounting exchange had cleaned the bankers out days ago, so we changed some French money in the railway station at Kehl. For ten francs I received 670 marks. Ten francs amounted to about ninety cents in Canadian money. That ninety cents lasted Mrs. Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had one hundred and twenty marks left!

  Our first purchase was from a fruit stand beside the main street of Kehl where an old woman was selling apples, peaches and plums. We picked out five very good looking apples and gave the old woman a fifty mark note. She gave us back thirty-eight marks in change. A very nice looking, white bearded old gentleman saw us buy the apples and raised his hat.

  “Pardon me, sir,” he said, rather timidly, in German, “how much were the apples?”

  I counted the change and told him twelve marks.