The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

She bit her lip and then said, “I suppose I wanted to be partners even though I said I didn’t.”

I guess that was part of the dream and why the hell shouldn’t it be? Roger thought. What do you have to hurt her for you bastard? Be good now fast before you hurt her.

“You see I’d like to have you not just like me in bed but like me in the head and like to talk about things that interest us both.”

“We will,” he said. “We will now. Bratchen daughter, what about writing, my dear beauty?”

“What I wanted to tell you was that drinking this made me feel the way I feel when I am going to write. That I could do anything and that I can write wonderfully. Then I write and it’s just dull. The truer I try to make it the duller it is. And when it isn’t true it’s silly.”

“Give me a kiss.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

He leaned over the table and kissed her. “You’re awfully beautiful when you cry.”

“I’m awfully sorry I cried,” she said. “You don’t really mind if we talk about it do you?”

“Of course not.”

“You see that was one of the parts of it I’d looked forward to.”

Yes, I guess it was, he thought. Well why shouldn’t it be? And we’ll do it. Maybe I will get to like it.

“What was it about writing?” he said. “Besides how it seems it’s going to be wonderful and then it turns out dull?”

“Wasn’t it that way with you when you started?”

“No. When I started I’d feel as though I could do anything and while I was doing it I would feel like I was making the whole world and when I would read it I would think this is so good I couldn’t have written it. I must have read it somewhere. Probably in the Saturday Evening Post.”

“Weren’t you ever discouraged?”

‘Not when I started. I thought I was writing the greatest stories ever written and that people just didn’t have sense enough to know it.”

“Were you really that conceited?”

“Worse probably. Only I didn’t think I was conceited. I was just confident.”

“If those were your first stories, the ones I read, you had a right to be confident.”

“They weren’t,” he said. “All those first confident stories were lost. The ones you read were when I wasn’t confident at all.”

“How were they lost, Roger?”

“It’s an awful story. I’ll tell it to you sometime

“Wouldn’t you tell it to me now?”

“I hate to because it’s happened to other people and to better writers than I am and that makes it sound as though it were made up. There’s no reason for it ever happening and yet it’s happened many times and it still hurts like a bastard. No it doesn’t really. It has a scar over it now. A good thick scar.”

“Please tell me about it. If it’s a scar and not a scab it won’t hurt to will it?”

“No, daughter. Well I was very methodical in those days and I kept original manuscripts in one cardboard folder and typed originals in another and carbons in another. I guess it wasn’t so cockeyed methodical. I don’t know how else you’d do it. Oh the hell with this story.”

“No tell me.”

“Well I was working at the Lausanne Conference and it was the holidays coming up and Andrew’s mother who was a lovely girl and very beautiful and kind—”

“I was never jealous of her,” the girl said. “I was jealous of David’s and Tom’s mother.”

“You shouldn’t be jealous of either of them. They were both wonderful.”

“I was jealous of Dave’s and Tom’s mother,” Helena said. “I’m not now.”

“That’s awfully white of you,” Roger said. “Maybe we ought to send her a cable.”

“Go on with the story, please, and don’t be bad.”

“All right. The aforesaid Andy’s mother thought she would bring down my stuff so I could have it with me and be able to do some work while we had the holiday together. She was going to bring it to me as a surprise. She hadn’t written anything about it and when I met her at Lausanne I didn’t know anything about it. She was a day late and had wired about it. The only thing I knew was that she was crying when I met her and she cried and cried and when I would ask her what was the matter she told me it was too awful to tell me and then she would cry again. She cried as though her heart was broken. Do I have to tell this story?”

“Please tell me.”

“All that morning she would not tell me and I thought of all the worst possible things that could have happened and asked her if they had happened. But she just shook her head. The worst thing I could think of was that she had tromper-ed me or fallen in love with someone else and when I asked her that she said, ‘Oh how can you say that?’ and cried some more. I felt relieved then and then, finally, she told me.

“She had packed all the manuscript folders in a suitcase and left the suitcase with her other bags in her first class compartment in the Paris-Lausanne-Milan Express in the Gare de Lyon while she went out on the quai to buy a London paper and a bottle of Evian water. You remember the Gare de Lyon and how they would have sort of push tables with papers and magazines and mineral water and small flasks of cognac and sandwiches with ham between sliced long pointed-end bread wrapped in paper and other push carts with pillows and blankets that you rented? Well when she got back into the compartment with her paper and her Evian water the suitcase was gone.

“She did everything there was to be done. You know the French police. The first thing she had to do was show her carte d’identite and try to prove she was not an international crook herself and that she did not suffer from hallucinations and that she was sure she actually had such a suitcase and were the papers of political importance and besides, madame, surely there exist copies. She had that all night and the next day when a detective came and searched the flat for the suitcase and found a shotgun of mine and demanded to know if I had a permis de chasse I think there was some doubt in the minds of the police whether she should be allowed to proceed to Lausanne and she said the detective had followed her to the train and appeared in the compartment just before the train pulled out and said, ‘You are quite sure madame that all your baggage is intact now? That you have not lost anything else? No other important papers?’

“So I said, ‘But it’s all right really. You can’t have brought the originals and the typed originals and the carbons.’

“‘But I did,’ she said. ‘Roger, I know I did.’ It was true too. I found out it was true when I went up to Paris to see. I remember walking up the stairs and opening the door to the flat, unlocking it and pulling back on the brass handle of the sliding lock and the odor of Eau de Tavel in the kitchen and the dust that had sifted in through the windows on the table in the dining room and going to the cupboard where I kept the stuff in the dining room and it was all gone. I was sure it would be there; that some of the manila folders would be there because I could see them there so clearly in my mind. But there was nothing there at all, not even my paper clips in a cardboard box nor my pencils and erasers nor my pencil sharpener that was shaped like a fish, nor my envelopes with the return address typed in the upper left-hand corner, nor my international postage coupons that you enclosed for them to send the manuscripts back with and that were kept in a small Persian lacquered box that had a pornographic painting inside of it. They were all gone. They had all been packed in the suitcase. Even the red stick of wax was gone that I had used to seal letters and packages. I stood there and looked at the painting inside the Persian box and noticed the curious over-proportion of the parts represented that always characterizes pornography and I remember thinking how much I disliked pornographic pictures and painting and writing and how after this box had been given to me by a friend on his return from Persia I had only looked at the painted interior once to please the friend and that after that I had only used the box as a convenience to keep coupons and stamps in and had never seen the pictures. I felt almost as though I could not breathe when I saw that there really were no folders with originals, nor folders with typed copies, nor folders with carbons and then I locked the door of the cupboard and went into the next room, which was the bedroom, and lay down on the bed and put a pillow between my legs and my arms around another pillow and lay there very quietly. I had never put a pillow between my legs before and I had never lain with my arms around a pillow but now I needed them very badly. I knew everything I had ever written and everything that I had great confidence in was gone. I had rewritten them so many times and gotten