The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

them just how I wanted them and I knew I could not write them again because once I had them right I forgot them completely and each time I ever read them I wondered at them and at how I had ever done them.

“So I lay there without moving with the pillows for friends and I was in despair. I had never had despair before, true despair, nor have I ever had it since. My forehead lay against the Persian shawl that covered the bed, which was only a mattress and springs set on the floor and the bed cover was dusty too and I smelt the dust and lay there with my despair and the pillows were my only comfort.”

“What were they that were gone,” the girl asked.

“Eleven stories, a novel, and poems.”

“Poor poor Roger.”

“No. I wasn’t so poor because there were more inside. Not them. But to come. But I was in bad shape. You see I hadn’t believed they could be gone. Not everything.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing very practical. I lay there for a while.”

“Did you cry?”

“No. I was all dried up inside like the dust in the house. Weren’t you ever in despair?”

“Of course. In London. But I could cry.”

“I’m sorry, daughter. I got to thinking about this thing and I forgot. I’m awfully sorry.”

“What did you do?”

“Let’s see I got up and went down the stairs and spoke to the concierge and she asked me about madame. She was worried because the police had been to the flat and had asked her questions but she was still cordial. She asked me if we had found the valise that had been stolen and I said no and she said it was dirty luck and a great misfortune and was it true that all my works were in it. I said yes and she said but how was it there were no copies? I said the copies were there too. Then she said Mais ca alors. Why were copies made to lose them with the originals? I said madame had packed them by mistake. It was a great mistake, she said. A fatal mistake. But monsieur can remember them surely. No, I said. But, she said, monsieur will have to remember them. Il faut le souvienne rappeler. Oui, I said, mais ce n’est pas possible. Je ne m’en souviens plus. Mais il faut faire un effort, she said. Je le ferais, I said. But it’s useless. Mais qu’est-ce que monsieur va faire? she asked. Monsieur has worked here for three years. I have seen monsieur work at the cafe on the corner. I’ve seen monsieur at work at the table in the dining room when I’ve brought things up. Je sais que monsieur travaille comme un sourd. Qu’es-ce que il faut faire maintenant? Il faut recommencer, I said. Then the concierge started to cry. I put my arm around her and she smelled of armpit sweat and dust and old black clothes and her hair smelled rancid and she cried with her head on my chest. Were there poems too? she asked. Yes, I said. What unhappiness, she said. But you can recall those surely. Je tacherai de la faire, I said. Do it, she said. Do it tonight.

“I will, I told her. Oh monsieur, she said, madame is beautiful and amiable and tous le qui’il y a de gentil but what a grave error it was. Will you drink a glass of marc with me? Of course, I told her, and, sniffing, she left my chest to find the bottle and the two small glasses. To the new works, she said. To them, I said. Monsieur will be a member of the Academie Francaise. No, I said. The Academie Americaine, she said. Would you prefer rum? I have some rum. No, I said. Marc is very good. Good, she said. Another glass. Now, she said, go out and get yourself drunk and, since Marcelle is not coming to do the flat, as soon as my husband comes in to hold down this dirty loge I will go upstairs and clean the place up for you to sleep tonight. Do you want me to buy anything for you? Do you want me to make breakfast? I asked her. Certainly, she said. Give me ten francs and I’ll bring you the change. I’d make you dinner but you ought to eat out tonight. Even though it is more expensive. Allez voir des amis et manger quelque part. If it wasn’t for my husband I’d come with you.

“Come on and have a drink at the Cafe des Amateurs now, I said. We’ll have a hot grog. No I can’t leave this cage until my husband comes, she said. Debine-toi maintenant. Leave me the key. It will all be in order when you get back.

“She was a fine woman and I felt better already because I knew there was only one thing to do; to start over. But I did not know if I could do it. Some of the stories had been about boxing, and some about baseball and others about horse racing. They were the things I had known best and had been closest to and several were about the first war. Writing them I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag; and I still had that evil habit and now it had caught up with me.

“But the concierge, and the smell of the concierge, and her practicality and determination hit my despair as a nail might hit it if it were driven in cleanly and soundly and I thought I must do something about this; something practical; something that will be good for me even if it cannot help about the stories. Already I was half glad the novel was gone because I could see already, as you begin to see clearly over the water when a rainstorm lifts on the ocean as the wind carries it out to sea, that I could write a better novel. But I missed the stories as though they were a combination of my house, and my job, my only gun, my small savings and my wife; also my poems. But the despair was going and there was only missing now as after a great loss. Missing is very bad too.”

“I know about missing,” the girl said.

“Poor daughter,” he said. “Missing is bad. But it doesn’t kill you. But despair would kill you in just a little time.”

“Really kill you?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Can we have another?” she asked. “Will you tell me the rest? This is the sort of thing I always wondered about.”

“We can have another,” Roger said. “And I’ll tell you the rest if it doesn’t bore you.”

“Roger, you mustn’t say that about boring me.”

“I bore the hell out of myself sometimes,” he said. “So it seemed normal I might bore you.”

“Please make the drink and then tell me what happened.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career for The Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the Red Cross. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the literary expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923 and was followed by the short story selection In Our Time, which marked his American debut in 1925. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the “lost generation” but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed by Men Without Women in 1927, when Hemingway returned to the United States, and his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely—to Spain, Florida, Italy, and Africa—and wrote about his experiences in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his classic treatise on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big game hunting in Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and covered the European front during the Second World War. Hemingway’s most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration.” One of the most important influences on the