Short Fiction by Ernest Hemingway (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

face was lined and gray. She looks a little like that actress that died in Pittsburgh. What was her name? Lenore Ulric. In Peter Pan. That was it. They say she always went about veiled, Scripps thought. There was an interesting woman. Was it Lenore Ulric? Perhaps not. No matter.

“You really want some more beans?” asked the waitress.

“Yes,” Scripps answered simply.

“Once again on the loud ones,” the waitress called into the wicket. “Lay off the bird.”

“On the fire,” came the response.

“Please go on with your story,” Scripps said kindly.

“It was the year of the Paris Exposition,” she began. “I was a young girl at the time, a jeune fille, and I came over from England with my mother. We were going to be present at the opening of the exposition. On our way from the Gare du Nord to the hotel in the Place Vendôme where we lodged, we stopped at a coiffeur’s shop and made some trifling purchase. My mother, as I recall, purchased an additional bottle of ‘smelling salts,’ as you call them here in America.”

She smiled.

“Yes, go on. Smelling salts,” Scripps said.

“We registered, as is customary, in the hotel, and were given the adjoining rooms we had reserved. My mother felt a bit done in by the trip, and we dined in our rooms. I was full of excitement about seeing the exposition on the morrow. But I was tired after the journey⁠—we had had a rather nasty crossing⁠—and slept soundly. In the morning I awoke and called for my mother. There was no answer, and I went into the room to waken Mummy. Instead of Mummy there was a French general in the bed.”

“Mon Dieu!” Scripps said.

“I was terribly frightened,” the waitress went on, “and rang the bell for the management. The concierge came up, and I demanded to know where my mother was.

“ ‘But, mademoiselle,’ the concierge explained, ‘we know nothing about your mother. You came here with General So-and-so’⁠—I cannot remember the general’s name.”

“Call him General Joffre,” Scripps suggested.

“It was a name very like that,” the waitress said. “I was fearfully frightened and sent for the police, and demanded to see the guest-register. ‘You’ll find there that I am registered with my mother,’ I said. The police came and the concierge brought up the register. ‘See, madame,’ he said. ‘You are registered with the general with whom you came to our hotel last night.’

“I was desperate. Finally, I remembered where the coiffeur’s shop was. The police sent for the coiffeur. An agent of police brought him in.

“ ‘I stopped at your shop with my mother,’ I said to the coiffeur, ‘and my mother bought a bottle of aromatic salts.’

“ ‘I remember mademoiselle perfectly,’ the coiffeur said. ‘But you were not with your mother. You were with an elderly French general. He purchased, I believe, a pair of mustache tongs. My books, at any rate, will show the purchase.’

“I was in despair. In the meantime the police had brought in the cab driver who had brought us from the gare to the hotel. He swore that I had never been with my mother. Tell me, does this story bore you?”

“Go on,” said Scripps. “If you had ever been as hard up for plots as I have been!”

“Well,” the waitress said. “That’s all there is to the tale. I never saw my mother again. I communicated with the embassy, but they could do nothing. It was finally established by them that I had crossed the channel with my mother, but they could do nothing beyond that.” Tears came into the elderly waitress’s eyes. “I never saw Mummy again. Never again. Not even once.”

“What about the general?”

“He finally loaned me one hundred francs⁠—not a great sum even in those days⁠—and I came to America and became a waitress. That’s all there is to the story.”

“There’s more than that,” Scripps said. “I’d stake my life there’s more than that.”

“Sometimes, you know, I feel there is,” the waitress said. “I feel there must be more than that. Somewhere, somehow, there must be an explanation. I don’t know what brought the subject into my mind this morning.”

“It was a good thing to get it off your mind,” Scripps said.

“Yes,” the waitress smiled, the lines in her face not quite so deep now. “I feel better now.”

“Tell me,” Scripps asked the waitress. “Is there any work in this town for me and my bird?”

“Honest work?” asked the waitress. “I only know of honest work.”

“Yes, honest work,” Scripps said.

“They do say they’re hiring hands at the new pump-factory,” the waitress said. Why shouldn’t he work with his hands? Rodin had done it. Cézanne had been a butcher. Renoir a carpenter. Picasso had worked in a cigarette-factory in his boyhood. Gilbert Stuart, who painted those famous portraits of Washington that are reproduced all over this America of ours and hang in every schoolroom⁠—Gilbert Stuart had been a blacksmith. Then there was Emerson. Emerson had been a hod-carrier. James Russell Lowell had been, he had heard, a telegraph operator in his youth. Like that chap down at the station. Perhaps even now that telegrapher at the station was working on his “Thanatopsis” or his “To a Waterfowl.” Why shouldn’t he, Scripps O’Neil, work in a pump-factory?

“You’ll come back again?” the waitress asked.

“If I may,” Scripps said.

“And bring your bird.”

“Yes,” Scripps said. “The little chap’s rather tired now. After all, it was a hard night for him.”

“I should say it was,” agreed the waitress.

Scripps went out again into the town. He felt clearheaded and ready to face life. A pump-factory would be interesting. Pumps were big things now. Fortunes were made and lost in pumps every day in New York in Wall Street. He knew of a chap who’d cleaned up a cool half-million on pumps in less than half an hour. They knew what they were about, these big Wall Street operators.

Outside on the street he looked up at the sign. Best by Test, he read. They had