Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  “To the first man that pays a quarter for this 250,000-ruble note I am going to give free this German mark note for 10,000 marks.”

  The barker held both notes up for inspection.

  “Don’t ever think that Germany is through. You saw in the paper this morning that Poincaré is weakening. He’s weakening, and the mark will come back, too.”

  He was Coué-izing the crowd. A man pulled out a quarter.

  “Gimme one.”

  He took the two bills, folded them and put them in his inside coat pocket. He smiled as the spieler went on. He had a stake in Europe again.

  The foreign news would never be dry to him now.

  Four or five more men bought a half million rubles for a quarter. The rubles are not even quoted on the exchange any more—yet they and the worthless German marks have been sold all over Canada as investments.

  Then the money seller leaned over and picked up an envelope of thousand-mark notes. They were the well-printed pre-war notes that were in common use in Germany until the exchange tumbled from 20,000 marks to the dollar this spring down the toboggan where you can almost name the number of billions you want on a dollar and get them. None of these marks are worth any more than any others. Except as pieces of paper for wallpapering or soap wrappers.

  “These are special,” the money seller said. “I’m selling these at a dollar apiece. They used to be fifty cents. Now I’ve raised the price. Nobody has to buy them that doesn’t want them. They’re the real pre-war marks.”

  He fondled them. The real pre-war marks.

  Worth 15 cents a trillion before the New York banks refused to quote them any more last week.

  “What makes them any better than those marks you gave away?” asked a gaunt man leaning against the wall in the alley. He was one of those who had invested a quarter in Europe and was jealous of this new mark being sprung on him.

  “They’re all signed for in the Treaty of Vairsails,” the barker said confidentially. “Every one of these is signed for in the peace treaty. Germany has thirty years to redeem them at par.”

  The men standing in front of the soapbox looked respectfully at the marks that were signed for in the treaty. They were obviously out of reach of investors. But it was something to be near them.

  On the wall of the one-story shack that bounded the alley, the tall youth who smoked a pipe and stood in the background while the vendor of money talked had tacked a number of clippings and samples of foreign money.

  The clippings were mostly about the economic comeback made by Soviet Russia and various other foreign dispatches of an optimistic tone.

  With his forefinger the money vendor traced out the story of a dollar loan to some Austrian bank.

  “Now, who wants to buy 10,000 Austrian kronen for a dollar?” he asked the crowd, holding up one of the big purple bills of the old Hapsburg currency.

  In the banks today the Austrian crown is worth .0014½ cents. In other words, about 14 cents for 10,000 kronen. At one dollar for 10,000 kronen, the men in the alley were invited to take a flyer in Austrian currency.

  “Now, personally, I only keep enough Canadian money to pay the bills,” the spellbinder went on. “You can’t tell what is going to happen to Canadian money. Look at these different currencies today. A wise plan is to keep a little Russian money, a little German money, a little Austrian money, and a little British money.”

  Most of the men looked as though even the smallest amount of Canadian money would be exceedingly welcome. But they listened on, and every lot offered, after the spellbinder had talked long enough, found a quarter produced by somebody, and the hope of getting rich quick implanted in some man.

  “Take these Austrian bills, for example,” the money seller went on. “There’s a bill I sold for two dollars. Now I’m selling it for only a dollar. And I’ll give a million-ruble Soviet note away with it.”

  At this announcement, some of those who had bought the rubles for two bits a quarter-million looked sullen.

  “Oh, these are different rubles,” the vendor assured them.

  “There are some of these rubles here I wouldn’t take ten dollars for. Let some gentleman offer me ten dollars and see if he can get them.”

  “I won’t deny I have rivals,” the speaker proceeded. “They try and undersell me. They cut prices on me. But now I’m going to cut prices on them. My big rival asks 40 cents for a million-ruble note. I’m going to undercut him to the limit. He’s started this competition. Let’s see if he can stick in it. Gentlemen, I will give this million-ruble note away with an Austrian note for 10,000 crowns. All for one dollar.”

  No one seemed to have a dollar. So the reporter bought.

  “There’s a gentleman that can size up an investment,” the spieler said. “Now, you other gentlemen. You know Austria is coming back. She’s got to come back. Say the Austrian crown gets up to only half a cent in value. You have fifty dollars right off the bat.”

  But a dollar was out of the class of the investors present.

  Reluctantly the soapbox merchant went back to the more moderate amounts.

  “Now if a man want to invest a quarter,” he commenced, and held up one of the pink quarter-million ruble notes.

  Again his audience was with him. This was all right. There were still a few quarters to be invested. What was just one more meal in the face of a chance for a quarter-million dollars?

  War Medals for Sale

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 8, 1923

  What is the market price of valor? In a medal and coin shop on Adelaide Street, the clerk said: “No, we don’t buy them. There isn’t any demand.”

  “Do many men come in to sell medals?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. They come in every day. But we don’t buy medals from this war.”

  “What do they bring in?”

  “Victory medals mostly, 1914 Stars, a good many M.M.’s, and once in a while a D.C.M., or an M.C. We tell them to go over to the pawnshops where they can get their medal back if they get any money for it.”

  So the reporter went up to Queen Street and walked west past the glitering windows of cheap rings, junk shops, two-bit barber shops, secondhand clothing stores, and street hawkers, in search of the valor mart.

  Inside the pawnshop it was the same story.

  “No, we don’t buy them,” a young man with shiny hair said from behind a counter of unredeemed pledges. “There is no market for them at all. Oh, yes. They come in here with all sorts. Yes, M.C.’s. And I had a man in here the other day with a D.S.O. I send them over to the secondhand stores on York Street. They buy anything.”

  “What would you give me for an M.C.?” asked the reporter.

  “I’m sorry, Mac. We can’t handle it.”

  Out onto Queen Street went the reporter, and into the first secondhand shop he encountered. On the window was a sign, “We Buy and Sell Everything.”

  The opened door jangled a bell. A woman came in from the back of the shop. Around the counter were piled broken doorbells, alarm clocks, rusty carpenters’ tools, old iron keys, kewpies, crap shooters’ dice, a broken guitar and other things.

  “What do you want?” said the woman.

  “Got any medals to sell?” the reporter asked.

  “No. We don’t keep them things. What do you want to do? Sell me things?”

  “Sure,” said the reporter. “What’ll you give me for an M.C.?”

  “What’s that?” asked the woman, suspiciously, tucking her hands under her apron.

  “It’s a medal,” said the reporter. “It’s a silver cross.”

  “Real silver?” asked the woman.

  “I guess so,” the reporter said.

  “Don’t you know?” the woman said. “Ain’t you got it with you?”

  “No,” answered the reporter.

  “Well, you bring it in. If it’s real silver maybe I’ll make you a nice offer on it.” The woman smiled. “Say,” she said, “it ain’t one of them war medals, is it?�
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  “Sort of,” said the reporter.

  “Don’t you bother with it, then. Them things are no good!”

  In succession the reporter visited five more secondhand stores. None of them handled medals. No demand.

  In one store the sign outside said, “We Buy and Sell Everything of Value. Highest Prices Paid.”

  “What you want to sell?” snapped the bearded man back of the counter,

  “Would you buy any war medals?” the reporter queried.

  “Listen, maybe those medals were all right in the war. I ain’t saying they weren’t, you understand? But with me business is business. Why should I buy something I can’t sell?”

  The merchant was being very gentle and explanatory.

  “What will you give me for that watch?” asked the reporter.

  The merchant examined it carefully, opened the case and looked in the works. Turned it over in his hand and listened to it.

  “It’s got a good tick,” suggested the reporter.

  “That watch now,” said the heavily bearded merchant judicially, laying it down on the counter. “That watch now, is worth maybe sixty cents.”

  The reporter went on down York Street. There was a secondhand shop every door or so now. The reporter got, in succession, a price on his coat, another offer of seventy cents on his watch, and a handsome offer of forty cents for his cigarette case. But no one wanted to buy or sell medals.

  “Every day they come in to sell those medals. You’re the first man ever ask me about buying them for years,” a junk dealer said.

  Finally, in a dingy shop, the searcher found some medals for sale. The woman in charge brought them out from the cash till.

  They were a 1914–15 Star, a General Service Medal and a Victory medal. All three were fresh and bright in the boxes they had arrived in. All bore the same name and number. They had belonged to a gunner in a Canadian battery.

  The reporter examined them.

  “How much are they?” he asked.

  “I only sell the whole lot,” said the woman, defensively.

  “What do you want for the lot?”

  “Three dollars.”

  The reporter continued to examine the medals. They represented the honor and recognition his King had bestowed on a certain Canadian. The name of the Canadian was on the rim of each medal.

  “Don’t worry about those names, Mister,” the woman urged. “You could easy take off the names. Those would make you good medals.”

  “I’m not sure these are what I’m looking for,” the reporter said.

  “You won’t make no mistake if you buy those medals, Mister,” urged the woman, fingering them. “You couldn’t want no better medals than them.”

  “No, I don’t think they’re what I want,” the reporter demurred.

  “Well, you make me an offer on them.”

  “No.”

  “Just make me an offer. Make me any offer you feel like.”

  “Not today.”

  “Make me any kind of an offer. Those are good medals. Look at them. Will you give me a dollar for all the lot?”

  Outside the shop the reporter looked in the window. You could evidently sell a broken alarm clock. But you couldn’t sell an M.C.

  You could dispose of a secondhand mouth organ. But there was no market for a D.C.M.

  You could sell your old military puttees. But you couldn’t find a buyer for a 1914 Star.

  So the market price of valor remained undetermined.

  European Nightlife: A Disease

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 15, 1923

  Nightlife in Europe is not simply a list of cafés. It is a sort of strange disease, always existent, that has been fanned into flame since the war. Its flame is burning an entire generation.

  Paris nightlife is the most highly civilized and amusing. Berlin is the most sordid, desperate and vicious. Madrid is the dullest, and Constantinople is, or was, the most exciting.

  Paris goes to bed the earliest of any big town in the world. Promptly at twelve-thirty o’clock the last omnibuses leave on their crosstown trips, the last subway train roars along the Metro, and the streets around the Opéra empty as though a curfew had sounded. Taxis leave the streets to drive home, and the final trains are jammed with Parisians on their way home. Paris is dead.

  Hours before, shutters have been up and the residential quarters tight asleep. There remain only the nighthawks. Where do thy go?

  There are three oases of light in the tight-shuttered darkness of a Paris night.

  One of them is Montparnasse. Here the Latin Quarter cafés keep open a couple of hours more. There is no place in the world deader than a Montparnasse café unless you know the crowd. If you know the people, it is a club and a center for gossip, a common meeting place.

  Where is the really gay Paris nightlife we hear so much about? Where are the young people who never go to bed at night? The people that do not exist before ten o’clock at night?

  They are probably packed into a little place around the corner from the Hôtel Crillon in the staidest, most respectable, unBohemian quarter of Paris. In the Rue Boissy d’Anglais is the café of the Boeuf sur le Toit or the Bull-on-the-Roof, Jean Cocteau’s bar and dancing, where everyone in Paris who believes that the true way to burn the candle is by igniting it at both ends goes. By eleven o’clock the Boeuf is so crowded that there is no more room to dance. But all the world is there. Sitting at tables, talking and drinking while the jazz plays.

  But French nightlife is so civilized that it is not exciting to the outsider. Nightlife is a sort of state of mind. Either you are in it or you are out of it. It is in Cocteau’s bar that nightlife in the highest sense—that of living at night—is brought to the boiling point.

  The Boeuf, though, closes at two in the morning. Sometimes before. And two in the morning is when the true nightlifer is just getting under way. So in a taxi the nightlifer starts up the slopes of Montparnasse.

  Montmartre is the famous Paris place for night activity, It is compounded of the garish tourist traps around the Place de Clichy, with red-painted doors and thousands of electric light globes. These have fantastic names and fake artists who are hired to come in and sit at the tables to give a Bohemian atmosphere. They are run for the purpose of getting Americans, both North and South, to buy champagne.

  Champagne is the great symbol of nightlife to the uninitiated. And the tourist traps make the most of it. They sell champagne and champagne only. If the visitor tries to order anything else, he is given the choice of champagne or the street door. It ranges in price from six to eight dollars a bottle. While it is being drunk, the tourist can look around at other tourists and the hired artists who are dressed in Greenwich Village costumes.

  Champagne, by the way, is a sacred name in France. The only wine allowed by law to be called champagne wine comes from a certain defined district around Rheims in the Champagne province. Other fake champagne must be labeled Epernay, mousseux or whatever district they come from. There is a terrific fine for selling these wines from just outside the champagne district as the veritable wine. The real champagne vintners have important government connections.

  A patriotic-minded journalist heard that a certain Montmartre resort was selling mousseux as champagne. With a witness, he went into the place and ordered a single glass of champagne. He was served a sparkling liquid, the bubbles hopping and jumping to the surface. He paid a champagne price. The waiter went away.

  The journalist tasted the glass. “Mousseux!” he shouted. “The camel has served me with mousseux and I ordered champagne. What an outrage. Not only an outrage, but a breaking of the law. Bring the proprietor. Bring the proprietor instantly before I send for the police.”

  The proprietor is reported to have settled the case for 20,000 francs.

  Numberless other journalists and men-about-town ordered glasses of champagne after that, hoping for such a chance, but the mousseux sellers were wise. It was not worth the chance. It i
s costly business mistaking a Frenchman for a tourist.

  The famous Moulin Rouge on Montmartre is an enormous dancing place where shop girls, their gentlemen friends, and a certain number of tourists go to dance on a large and slippery floor in the glare cast by a spotlight that is supposed to give romance through different-colored celluloid disks that make a red, orange, or green glow. It is cheerful and innocuous, and one of the few places in Paris where the foreigners come into contact with French people taking their pleasure.

  The real nightlife places do not open up until after three o’clock in the morning. At present the two most notable of these are the Caucasian, a very smart Russian place, and Florence’s. Florence is an American Negress who has made a tremendous vogue for herself in Paris as a dancer.

  When I first met her some time ago, she was a typical Negro dancer, jolly, funny and wonderful on her feet. Until you had seen Florence dance the “Everybody Steps,” you had seen nothing.

  Then a section of the French nobility took her up. She danced at the home of the Princesse de This and the Comtesse de That. Late last summer we wandered into Florence’s dancing place to get some corn-beef hash with poached egg and buckwheat cakes at two-thirty in the morning. It was absolutely dead. No one had come in yet. The Negro staff were not overeager to serve us. They thought we ought to buy champagne.

  Now the mark of a real student of nightlife is that he should be considered so much of an asset to a place that the compulsory-consumption-of-champagne rule should be suspended in his favor.

  “We’re old friends of Florence,” I explained.

  “Suah, boss. What’ll you all have? Beeah? Anythin’ you say, boss.”

  We had a good meal, and then Florence came in. Florence was changed. She had acquired an English accent and a languid manner.

  “Oh. Hulloa,” she said. “Yes, I’m dawncing private now. But do drop in on us sometime heah. So jolly to see you again.”

  It wasn’t jolly at all. Another of the really amusing after-mid-night places had been ruined by prosperity.

  “Miss Flawnce she ain’t a Niggah no mo. No suh. She done tell customahs mammy’s an Indian lady fum Canada,” a waiter explained. “Ah’m luhnin’ to talk that English way, too. Ah’m goin’ tuh tell people my mammy’s an Indian lady fuhm Noble Scotia. Yes, suh. We’ll all be Indiums this tahm nex’ yeah. Yes, suh.”