Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  Dr. Coleman considered a moment. “You may be perfectly sure that if the material was of any use they would have used it in Sudbury,” he said. “Hard coal is a good deal more expensive in Sudbury than in Toronto. I suppose that Mr. Watson is keeping a careful record of what the drill encounters and I hope that it will be at the disposal of the Bureau of Mines. We would be very interested in the different materials the drills encounter. For example, if they hit any amount of quartz and what quantity.”

  Japanese Earthquake

  The Toronto Daily Star

  September 25, 1923

  There are no names in this story.

  The characters in it are a reporter, a girl reporter, a quite beautiful daughter in a Japanese kimono, and a mother. There is a small chorus of friends who spend some time talking in the next room, and get up as the reporter and the girl reporter go through the room and out of the door.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon the reporter and the girl reporter stood on the front porch. The front doorbell had just rung.

  “They’ll never let us in,” said the girl reporter.

  Inside the house they heard someone moving around and then a voice said, “I’ll go down. I’ll attend to them, Mother.”

  The door opened one narrow crack. The crack ran from the top of the door to the bottom, and about halfway up it was a very dark, very beautiful face, the hair soft and parted in the middle.

  “She is beautiful, after all,” thought the reporter. He had been sent on so many assignments in which beautiful girls figured, and so few of the girls had ever turned out to be beautiful.

  “Who do you want?” said the girl at the door.

  “We’re from the Star,” the reporter said. “This is Miss So-and-So.”

  “We don’t want to have anything to do with you. You can’t come in,” the girl said.

  “But—” said the reporter and commenced to talk. He had a very strong feeling that if he stopped talking at any time, the door would slam. So he kept on talking. Finally the girl opened the door. “Well, I’ll let you in,” she said. “I’ll go upstairs and ask my mother.”

  She went upstairs, quick and lithe, wearing a Japanese kimono. It ought to have some other name. Kimono has a messy, early-morning sound. There was nothing kimonoey about this kimono. The colors were vivid and the stuff had body to it, and it was cut. It looked almost as though it might be worn with two swords to the belt.

  The girl reporter and the reporter sat on a couch in the parlor. “I’m sorry to have done all the talking,” whispered the reporter.

  “No. Go on. Keep it up. I never thought we’d get in at all,” said the girl reporter. “She is good-looking, isn’t she?” The reporter had thought she was beautiful. “And didn’t she know what she was doing when she got that kimono!”

  “Sh—. Here they come.”

  Down the stairs came the girl in the Japanese kimono. With her was her mother. Her mother’s face was very firm.

  “What I want to know,” she said, “is where you got those pictures?”

  “They were lovely pictures, weren’t they?” said the girl reporter.

  Both the girl reporter and the reporter denied any knowledge of the pictures. They didn’t know. Really, they didn’t know. It was a fact. Eventually they were believed.

  “We won’t say anything. We don’t want to be in the newspapers. We’ve had too much already. There are plenty of people that suffered much worse than we did in the earthquake. We don’t want to talk about it at all.”

  “But I let them in, Mother,” said the daughter. She turned to the reporter. “Just exactly what is it you want to know from us?”

  “We just want you to tell us as you remember it just what happened,” the reporter said.

  “If we talk to you and tell you what you want to know will you promise that you won’t use our names?” asked the daughter.

  “Why not just use the names,” suggested the reporter.

  “We don’t say a word unless you promise not to use the names,” said the daughter.

  “Oh, you know newspaper reporters,” the mother said. “They’ll promise it and then they’ll use them anyway.” It looked as though there wasn’t going to be any story. The remark had made the reporter violently angry. It is the one unmerited insult. There are enough merited ones.

  “Mrs. So-and-So,” he said, “the president of the United States tells reporters things in confidence which if known would cost him his job. Every week in Paris the prime minister of France tells fifteen newspaper reporters facts that if they were quoted again would overthrow the French government. I’m talking about newspaper reporters, not cheap news tipsters.”

  “All right,” said the mother. “Yes, I guess it’s true about newspaper reporters.”

  The daughter began the story and the mother took it up.

  “The boat [the Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Australia] was all ready to sail,” said the daughter. “If Mother and Father hadn’t been down at the dock, I don’t believe they would have escaped!”

  “The Empress boats always sail at noon on Saturday,” said the mother.

  “Just before twelve o’clock, there was a great rumbling sound and then everything commenced to rock back and forth. The dock rolled and bucked. My brother and I were on board the boat leaning against the rail. Everybody had been throwing streamers. It only lasted about thirty seconds,” said the daughter.

  “We were thrown flat on the dock,” said the mother. “It was a big concrete dock and it rolled back and forth. My husband and I hung on to each other and were thrown around by it. Many people were thrown off. I remember seeing a rickshaw driver clambering back up out of the water. Cars and everything else went in, except our car. It stayed on the dock right alongside the Prince de Bearn’s, the French consul’s car, until the fire came.”

  “What did you do when the shock was over?” asked the reporter.

  “We went ashore. We had to climb. The dock was crumbled in places and great chunks of concrete broken off. We started off up the Bund along the shore and could see that the big go-downs, the storage houses, were all caved in. You know the Bund. The driveway straight along the waterfront. We got as far as the British consulate and it was all caved in. Just fallen in on itself like a funnel. Just crumbled. All the walls were down and we could look through the front of the building to the open compound at the back. Then there was another shock and we knew it wasn’t any use going on or trying to get up to our house. My husband heard that the people had been out of the office and there was nothing you could do about the men who had been working in the go-downs. There was a big cloud of dust all over everything from the buildings that had caved in. You couldn’t hardly see through it, and fires were breaking out all over.”

  “What were the people doing? How were they acting?” asked the reporter.

  “There wasn’t any panic. That was the strange thing. I didn’t see anyone even hysterical. There was one woman at the Russian consulate though. It stood right next to the British consulate and it hadn’t fallen in yet but was badly shaken. She came out to the front gate crying and there were a bunch of coolies sitting against the iron fence in front of the consulate yard. She begged them to help her get her daughter out of the building. “She’s just a little fellow,” she said in Japanese. But they just sat there. They wouldn’t move. It seemed as though they couldn’t move. Of course nobody was going around helping anybody else then. Everybody had themselves to look after.”

  “How did you get back to the boat?” asked the girl reporter.

  “There were some sampans, native boats, and finally my husband found one and we started back. But the fire was going so badly then and the wind was offshore. There was an awful wind for a while. We got to the dock finally and, of course, they couldn’t get a gangplank out, but they put out a rope for us and we got on board.”

  The mother didn’t need any prompting or questions now. That day and the following days and nights in Yokohama harbor had her in the
ir grip again. Now the reporter saw why she didn’t want to be interviewed and why no one had any right to interview her and stir it all up afresh. Her hands were very quietly nervous.

  “The Prince’s boy [son of the Prince de Bearn, French consul] was left in their house. He had been sick. They had just come down to the dock to see the boat off. The foreign quarter is up on a bluff where we all lived, and the bluff just slid down into town. The Prince got ashore and made his way up to the wreck of his house. They got the boy out but his back was hurt. They worked hours getting him out. But they couldn’t get the French butler out. They had to go away and leave him in there because the fire got too close.”

  “They had to leave him in there alive with the fire coming on?” asked the girl reporter.

  “Yes, they had to leave the French butler in there,” said the mother. “He was married to the housemaid so they had to tell her they had gotten him out.”

  The mother went on in a dull, tired voice.

  “There was a woman on the [liner] Jefferson coming home that had lost her husband. I didn’t recognize her. There was a young couple, too, that had been only out a short time. They’d just been married. His wife was down in the town shopping when it happened. He couldn’t get to where she was on account of the fire. They got the head doctor out all right from the American Hospital. They couldn’t get out the assistant doctor and his wife though. The fire came so quick. The whole town was solid fire.

  “We were on the boat of course. Part of the time you couldn’t see the shore on account of the smoke. When it was bad was when the submarine oil tanks burst and the oil caught on fire. It moved down the harbor and toward the dock. When it got to the dock we wondered if we’d been saved on board the Empress just to get burned. The captain had all the boats launched on the far side away from the fire and was all ready to put us into them. We couldn’t go on the side toward the fire of course. It was too hot. They were playing the hoses on it to drive it away. It kept coming on though.

  “All the time they were working to cut through the anchor chain that had fouled in the propeller. Just to cut it away from the boat. Finally they got the Empress away from the dock. It was wonderful the way they got her away without any tug. It was something you wouldn’t have believed it was possible to do in Yokohama harbor. It was wonderful.

  “Of course they were bringing wounded people and refugees on all day and all night. They came out in sampans or anything. They took them all on. We slept on the deck.

  “My husband said he was relieved when we’d got outside the breakwater,” the mother said. “There’re supposed to be two old craters in the harbor itself, and he was worried that something was going to happen from them.”

  “Was there no tidal wave?” asked the reporter.

  “No. There wasn’t any at all. When we were on our way to Kobe, after we had left Yokohama finally, there were three or four small shocks that you could feel in the boat. But there weren’t any tidal waves.”

  Her mind was going back to Yokohama harbor. “Some of the people that had stood up all night in the water were very tired,” she offered.

  “Oh, the people that had stood up all night in the water,” said the reporter softly.

  “Yes, to keep out of the fire. There was one old woman who must have been seventy-six years old. She was in the water all night. There were lots of people in the canals, too. Yokohama’s all cut up with canals, you know.”

  “Didn’t that make it more confused in the earthquake?” asked the girl reporter.

  “Oh, no. They were very good things to have in a fire,” said the mother quite serenely.

  “What did you think when it started?” asked the reporter.

  “Oh, we knew it was an earthquake,” said the mother. “It was just that nobody knew it was going to be so bad. There’s been lots of earthquakes there. Once, nine years ago, we’d had five shocks in one day. We just wanted to get into the town to see if everything was all right. But when we saw it was so bad, we knew then it didn’t matter about things. I hadn’t intended to come home. Just my daughter and son were sailing. My husband is still in Kobe. He has a lot of work to do now reorganizing.”

  Just then the telephone rang. “My mother is busy just now interviewing the reporters,” the daughter said in the next room. She was talking with some friends that had come in. It was something about music. The reporter listened with his odd ear for a moment to see if it was anything about the earthquake. But it wasn’t.

  The mother was very tired. The girl reporter stood up. The reporter got up.

  “You understand. No names,” said the mother.

  “You’re sure? They wouldn’t do any harm, you know.”

  “You said you wouldn’t use the names,” the mother said wearily. The reporters went out. The friends stood up as they went through the room.

  The reporter took a look at the Japanese kimono as the door was shut.

  “Who’s going to write the story. You or me?” asked the girl reporter.

  “I don’t know,” said the reporter.

  Lord Birkenhead

  The Toronto Daily Star

  October 4, 1923

  Lord Birkenhead, the austere, unapproachable, super-cynical and supercilious Earl of Birkenhead is a myth.

  On the Woolsack as Lord High Chancellor in a wax-white wig he had the profile of a pharaoh and the grave and graven immobility of a sphinx.

  When the Star saw him at the breakfast table in his private car at the Union Station, he wore a madonna or cigar-blue sweater coat and a Roman punch or Roman stripe tie. These were tennis togs and he was keener for postprandial tennis than for postprandial oratory.

  He is supposed to have a personality that bristles with thorns of mordant wit. He has been called a stream of lava, a political scorpion, a douche of vitriol and other things that indicate verbal asperity. Above all he was said to have a dislike of interviews.

  However that may be, his Canadian tour has put him in excellent humor. Toronto smiled on him with a warm October sun and he smiled back at Toronto, even though the only indication of a civic welcome was a great pile of milk cans—empties—on the platform alongside his car.

  He was cheerful, affable, chatty, but of course not too politically or personally communicative. The Star was equipped with a formidable list of questions as if he were the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But he has disclaimed that distinction. He has won many honors but that is not one of them.

  “Do you care to say anything about the League of Nations or your estimate of Woodrow Wilson?” asked the Star. “I have said my say on that,” he replied. “I retract nothing, but there is no point in stirring the matter up again.”

  He was not discussing those high problems during his trip. “Oh dear, no,” he said. “I am just giving my reminiscences of twenty years of public life, the celebrities I have met and so forth.”

  On the question of Prohibition he did not mince matters but he was judicial rather than vitriolic. “You cannot say that Prohibition in the States has been a failure. You cannot say it has been a success. For myself I do not like it.”

  “Then it is not true,” remarked the Star, “that you have made a wager of $5,000 that you would be a Prohibitionist for two years.”

  It was not true. His views on this matter were not undergoing any conversion into specie. Neither was it true that he had given up smoking for health reasons. The long after-breakfast cigar in his mouth, the tan on his face and his general appearance of health and vigor belied that rumor. In fact, in his flannels and striped tie, he looked not unlike one of the Leander rowing men, except, for course, for a slight discrepancy at the waist.

  “Is there any English opinion on the matter of rum-running?” asked the Star, pursuing the Prohibition topic. “Not that I am aware of,” said he. “We feel no obligation to help in the enforcement of American sumptuary laws. That is their own internal question. It is not for us to interfere.”

  He did not wish to pose as a political prophet but
he saw no signs of England going dry. England’s humidity would last his time. After him the drought, perhaps, but it was a very great perhaps.

  “Then Lady Astor’s broom is not really sweeping England?” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “England will never tolerate,” he went on, “a condition of things under which wealthy men have special liquor privileges. Our people would rebel against inequalities in this matter. Prohibition has, of course, certain things to its credit. It has another thing to its debit, the infringement of personal liberty, and social and legal inequalities.”

  Lord Birkenhead, as F. E. Smith, which some after his phenomenal success at the bar called “Fee” Smith, won all the prizes Balliol had to offer. The talk turned on Oxford and the good port at the high tables and the exceedingly bad port at the undergraduate tables. Here Lord Birkenhead indulged in a legal jest. “Lex non curat de minimis,” said he. That is to say the Dons do not worry about undergraduate stomachs. After all even England has inequalities in the matter of liquor.

  Asked if he approved of the Canadian appeal to the Privy Council, he gave a cautious opinion which he has given before. “We are pleased to act,” said he, “as your supreme court of judicature. We assign to it our best judges. It is for you to say when that system shall cease.” But while it lasted, English judges were proud to devote their talents to the elucidation of Canadian legal mysteries. But it was a labor of love and glory, not of profit, for it imposed extra and unpaid burdens.

  “Some people here,” said the reporter, “complain of the expense.”

  “We cannot be expected to provide litigants with transportation,” laughed the earl. “If that were so all our legal roads would lead to London.”

  Lighter questions seemed more appropriate to the breakfast table. “When is the prince going to get married?” asked the Star.