Around that Place there were two
kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs.
The drunkards killed their poverty
that way; the sportifs took it out in
exercise. They were the descendants
of the Communards and it was no
struggle for them to know their
politics. They knew who had shot
their fathers, their relatives, their
brothers, and their friends when the
Versailles troops came in and took
the town after the Commune and
executed any one they could catch
with calloused hands, or who wore a
cap, or carried any other sign he was
a working man. And in that poverty,
and in that quarter across the street
from a Boucherie Chevaline and a
wine cooperative he had written the
start of all he was to do. There never
was another part of Paris that he
loved like that, the sprawling trees,
the old white plastered houses
painted brown below, the long green
of the autobus in that round square,
the purple flower dye upon the
paving, the sudden drop down the hill
of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the
River, and the other way the narrow
crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.
The street that ran up toward the
Pantheon and the other that he
always took with the bicycle, the only
asphalted street in all that quarter,
smooth under the tires, with the high
narrow houses and the cheap tall
hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.
There were only two rooms in the
apartments where they lived and he
had a room on the top floor of that
hotel that cost him sixty francs a
month where he did his writing, and
from it he could see the roofs and
chimney pots and all the hills of
Paris.
From the apartment you could only
see the wood and coal man's place.
He sold wine too, bad wine. The
golden horse's head outside the
Boucherie Chevaline where the
carcasses hung yellow gold and red
in the open window, and the green
painted co-operative where they
bought their wine; good wine and
cheap. The rest was plaster walls
and the windows of the neighbors.
The neighbors who, at night, when
some one lay drunk in the street,
moaning and groaning in that typical
French ivresse that you were
propaganded to believe did not exist,
would open their windows and then
the murmur of talk.
''Where is the policeman? When you
don't want him the bugger is always
there. He's sleeping with some
concierge. Get the Agent. " Till some
one threw a bucket of water from a
window and the moaning stopped.
''What's that? Water. Ah, that's
intelligent." And the windows
shutting. Marie, his femme de
menage, protesting against the eight-
hour day saying, ''If a husband works
until six he gets only a riffle drunk on
the way home and does not waste
too much. If he works only until five
he is drunk every night and one has
no money. It is the wife of the
working man who suffers from this
shortening of hours. '
"Wouldn't you like some more
broth?" the woman asked him now.
"No, thank you very much. It is
awfully good."
"Try just a little."
"I would like a whiskey-soda."
"It's not good for you."
"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter
wrote the words and the music.
This knowledge that you're going
mad for me."
"You know I like you to drink."
"Oh yes. Only it's bad for me."
When she goes, he thought, I'll have
all I want. Not all I want but all
there is. Ayee he was tired. Too
tired. He was going to sleep a little
while. He lay still and death was
not there. It must have gone around
another street. It went in pairs, on
bicycles, and moved absolutely
silently on the pavements.
No, he had never written about Paris.
Not the Paris that he cared about.
But what about the rest that he had
never written?
What about the ranch and the
silvered gray of the sage brush, the
quick, clear water in the irrigation
ditches, and the heavy green of the
alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills
and the cattle in the summer were
shy as deer. The bawling and the
steady noise and slow moving mass
raising a dust as you brought them
down in the fall. And behind the
mountains, the clear sharpness of the
peak in the evening light and, riding
down along the trail in the moonlight,
bright across the valley. Now he
remembered coming down through
the timber in the dark holding the
horse's tail when you could not see
and all the stories that he meant to
write.
About the half-wit chore boy who
was left at the ranch that time and
told not to let any one get any hay,
and that old bastard from the Forks
who had beaten the boy when he had
worked for him stopping to get some
feed. The boy refusing and the old
man saying he would beat him
again. The boy got the rifle from the
kitchen and shot him when he tried
to come into the barn and when they
came back to the ranch he'd been
dead a week, frozen in the corral, and
the dogs had eaten part of him. But
what was left you packed on a sled
wrapped in a blanket and roped on
and you got the boy to help you haul
it, and the two of you took it out over
the road on skis, and sixty miles
down to town to turn the boy over.
He having no idea that he would be
arrested. Thinking he had done his
duty and that you were his friend and
he would be rewarded. He'd helped to
haul the old man in so everybody
could know how bad the old man had
been and how he'd tried to steal
some feed that didn't belong to him,
and when the sheriff put the
handcuffs on the boy he couldn't
believe it. Then he'd started to cry.
That was one story he had saved to
write. He knew at least twenty good
stories from out there and he had
never written one. Why?
Title : Snows of kilimanjaro (6)
Description : Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs. The drunkards killed their poverty that way; the sportifs took it...