Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  But they will not elect him.

  They saw through Bill Bryan.

  They have gotten tired of Billy Sunday.

  Their men have such funny haircuts.

  They are hard to suck in on Europe.

  They have been there once.

  They produced Barney Google, Mutt and Jeff.

  And Jiggs.

  They do not hang lady murderers.

  They put them in vaudeville.

  They read The Saturday Evening Post.

  And believe in Santa Claus.

  And they make money.

  They make a lot of money.

  They are fine people.

  I Like Canadians

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 15, 1923

  I like Canadians.

  They are so unlike Americans.

  They go home at night.

  Their cigarettes don’t smell bad.

  Their hats fit.

  They really believe that they won the war.

  They don’t believe in Literature.

  They think Art has been exaggerated.

  But they are wonderful on ice skates.

  A few of them are very rich.

  But when they are rich they buy more horses

  Than motorcars.

  Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.

  But both boxing and horse racing are illegal

  In Chicago.

  Nobody works on Sunday.

  Nobody.

  That doesn’t make me mad.

  There is only one Woodbine.

  But were you ever at Blue Bonnets?

  If you kill somebody with a motorcar in Ontario.

  You are liable to go to jail.

  So it isn’t done.

  There have been over 500 people killed by motorcars.

  In Chicago

  So far this year.

  It is hard to get rich in Canada.

  But it is easy to make money.

  There are too many tearooms.

  But, then, there are no cabarets.

  If you tip a waiter a quarter

  He says “Thank you”

  Instead of calling the bouncer.

  They let women stand up in the streetcars.

  Even if they are good-looking.

  They are all in a hurry to get home to supper.

  And their radio sets.

  They are fine people.

  I like Canadians.

  The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 22, 1923

  To all but one of the half million inhabitants of Toronto it was Christmas Eve. To the blind man it was only the twenty-fourth of December.

  The blind man leaned against a building out of the sharp edge of the wind, and shifted from one foot to another on the sidewalk, while the city flowed by him in a last rush of Christmas preparation. He had come a long way to this town, by many different stages.

  Through the soles of the blind man’s shoes the cold from the wet stone sidewalk was numbing. It was snowing. The blind man could tell because the flakes struck his face for an instant touch of damp cold. The crowd kept moving past.

  It was a strange city the blind man had come to. The policemen were all giants. He knew they were giants because their voices came from high above his head and they talked a strange thick accent. The streets were full of people. But there was no jollity. Just a crowded river of people all moving somewhere. And it was cold.

  The blind man was not sure that he was not dead. He had been standing up against the building a long time. He was going to keep on standing there. After a while something would happen. Something always had happened.

  As a matter of fact if he stood there long enough he was sure to be taken up by one of the big policemen and would probably eat a very good Christmas dinner at the station house.

  But the blind man did not realize this. He was not thinking any more. He was just standing and it was very cold and very wet.

  As he stood looking out at all the things he could not see, some music started suddenly just beside him. It was an Italian organ-grinder, his coat collar turned up, his cap turned down, who had taken advantage of the shelter of the building against the wet snow and the crowd. He did not like the town either. But he had wine and garlic on his breath and a family in the Ward and he spat on the pavement for Canada and ground away.

  Although it was coming from just behind him, the music seemed to the blind man to come from a long way off. At first he did not notice the tune. But somewhere inside him it reached something. The blind man began to see.

  He saw a low, white-pillared house set far back in the trees at the end of a long, sandy drive. He saw a boy come riding up the drive on a pony and swing off at the horse block.

  “Christmas gift, Aunt Lucy,” the boy shouted to someone on the wide porch of the house.

  The music kept on. It wasn’t a very good hand organ and the wet had gotten into it.

  The blind man did not notice that the music was second-rate. He didn’t even notice that there was music. He was feeling a strange tight feeling inside himself and he was seeing things.

  He saw broad fields sloping away and he smelt the odor of bacon being fried early in the morning. He heard the pounding that thoroughbred horses’ hoofs make as they sweep down in a pack toward a fence and he saw that glimpse of a pleasant country that a man gets as he is on rises over a fence full in a pounding gallop. He saw a big square bed with linen sheets and a small boy tucked in the bed listening while someone sat on the bed and stroked his head and talked to him. And he saw a small boy rising early in the morning and going downstairs to start out across the frost-rimed fields with his dog and his gun. He saw many far-off forgotten things.

  Then the music stopped.

  “Would you mind playing that piece over again?” asked the blind man turning his face toward the Italian.

  “You like him? I like him, too. He’s a good piece, eh?” The Italian adjusted a button on the machine and commenced to grind out again, “Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home.”

  He looked up at the blind man while he ground, studying him critically and then grinding away like an artist.

  The blind man seemed to be absorbing the music. Suddenly he seemed to have enough. He did not look blank or sodden now. His ear was busy sorting out the traffic on the busy street. A policeman’s whistle shrilled. The blind man started calmly forward into the traffic.

  The Italian did not see him go. His head was bent low over the organ.

  Twenty minutes later the ambulance drove off with its gong clanging.

  “Did you hear what he said, Joe?” queried one attendant on the front seat.

  “Something about the old dumhicky home,” answered the other.

  “Sometimes it catches them cuckoo that way at the last,” observed the other attendant sagely.

  In the back of the ambulance a rough blanket covered the stretcher and under the blanket the face of the blind man was smiling. He had seen very clearly for some time.

  Christmas on the Roof of the World

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 22, 1923

  While it was still dark, Ida, the little German maid, came in and lit the fire in the big porcelain stove, and the burning pinewood roared up the chimney.

  Out the window the lake lay steel-gray far down below, with the snow-covered mountains bulking jagged beyond it, and far away beyond it the massive tooth of the Dent du Midi beginning to lighten with the first touch of morning.

  It was so cold outside. The air felt like something alive as I drew a deep breath. You could swallow the air like a drink of cold water.

  I reached up with a boot and banged on the ceiling.

  “Hey, Chink. It’s Christmas.”

  “Hooray!” came Chink’s voice down from the little room under the roof of the chalet.

  Herself was up in a warm, woollen dressing robe, with the heavy goat’s-wool skii
ng socks.

  Chink knocked at the door.

  “Merry Christmas, mes enfants,” he grinned. He wore the early morning garb of big, woolly dressing robe and thick socks that made us all look like some monastic order.

  In the breakfast room we could hear the stove roaring and crackling. Herself opened the door.

  Against the tall, white porcelain stove hung the three long skiing stockings, bulging and swollen with strange lumps and bulges. Around the foot of the stove were piled boxes. Two new shiny pairs of ash skis lay alongside the stove, too tall to stand in the lowceilinged chalet room.

  For a week we had each been making mysterious trips to the Swiss town below on the lake. Hadley and I, Chink and I, and Hadley and Chink, returning after dark with strange boxes and bundles that were concealed in various parts of the chalet. Finally we each had to make a trip alone. That was yesterday. Then last night we had taken turns on the stockings, each pledged not to sleuth.

  Chink had spent every Christmas since 1914 in the army. He was our best friend. For the first time in years it seemed like Christmas to all of us.

  We ate breakfast in the old, untasting, gulping, early-morning Christmas way, unpacked the stockings, down to the candy mouse in the toe; each made a pile of our things for future gloating.

  From breakfast we rushed into our clothes and tore down the icy road in the glory of the blue-white glistening Alpine morning. The train was just pulling out. Chink and I shot the skis into the baggage car, and we all three swung aboard.

  All Switzerland was on the move. Skiing parties, men, women, boys and girls, taking the train up the mountain, wearing their tight-fitting blue caps, the girls all in riding breeches and puttees, and shouting and calling out to one another. Platforms jammed.

  Everybody travels third class in Switzerland, and on a big day like Christmas the third class overflows and the overflow is crowded into the sacred red plush first-class compartments.

  Shouting and cheering, the train crawled alongside the mountain, climbing up toward the top of the world.

  There was no big Christmas dinner at noon in Switzerland. Everybody was out in the mountain air with a lunch in the rucksack and the prospect of dinner at night.

  When the train reached the highest point it made in the mountains, everybody piled out, the stacks of skis were unsorted from the baggage car and transferred to an open flatcar hooked on to a jerky little train that ran straight up the side of the mountain on cogwheels.

  At the top we could look out over the whole world, white, glistening in the powder snow, and ranges of mountains stretching off in every direction.

  It was the top of a bobsled run that looped and turned in icy windings far below. A bob shot past, all the crew moving in time, and as it rushed at express-train speed for the first turn, the crew all cried, “Ga-a-a-a-r!” and the bob roared in an icy smother around the curve and dropped off down the glassy run below.

  No matter how high you are in the mountains there is always a slope going up.

  There were long strips of sealskin harnessed on our skis, running back from the tip to the base in a straight strip with the grain of hair pointing back, so that you pushed right ahead through the snow going uphill. If your skis had a tendency to slide back, the slipping movement would be checked by the sealskin hairs. They would slip smoothly forward, but hold fast at the end of each thrusting stride.

  Soon the three of us were high above the shoulder of the mountain that had seemed the top of the world. We kept going up in single file, sliding smoothly up through the snow in a long upward zigzag.

  We passed through the last of the pines and came out on a shelving plateau. Here came the first run down—a half-mile sweep ahead. At the brow the skis seemed to drop out from under and in a hissing rush we all three swooped down the slope like birds.

  On the other side it was thrusting, uphill, steady climbing again. The sun was hot and the sweat poured off us in the steady uphill drive. There is no place you get so tanned as in the mountains in winter. Nor so hungry. Nor so thirsty.

  Finally we hit the lunching place, a snowed-under old log cattle barn where the peasant’s cattle would shelter in the summer when this mountain was green with pasture. Everything seemed to drop off sheer below us.

  The air at that height, about 6,200 feet, is like wine. We put on our sweaters that had been in our rucksacks coming up, unpacked the lunch and the bottle of white wine, and lay back on our rucksacks and soaked in the sun. Coming up we had been wearing sunglasses against the glare of the snowfields, and now we took off the amber-shaded goggles and looked out on a bright, new world.

  “I’m really too hot,” Herself said. Her face had burned coming up, even through the last crop of freckles and tan.

  “You ought to use lampblack on your face,” Chink suggested.

  But there is no record of any woman that has ever been willing to use that famous mountaineer’s specific against snow blindness and sunburn.

  It was no time after lunch and Herself’s daily nap, while Chink and I practiced turns and stops on the slope, before the heat was gone out of the sun and it was time to start down. We took off the sealskins and waxed our skis.

  Then in one long, dropping, swooping, heart-plucking rush, we were off. A seven-mile run down and no sensation in the world that can compare with it. You do not make the seven miles in one run. You go as fast as you believe possible, then you go a good deal faster, then you give up all hope, then you don’t know what happened, but the earth came up and over and over and you sat up and untangled yourself from your skis and looked around. Usually all three had spilled together. Sometimes there was no one in sight.

  But there is no place to go except down. Down in a rushing, swooping, flying, plunging rush of fast ash blades through the powder snow.

  Finally, in a rush we came out onto the road on the shoulder of the mountain where the cogwheel railway had stopped coming up. Now we were all a shooting stream of skiers. All the Swiss were coming down, too. Shooting along the road in a seemingly endless stream.

  It was too steep and slippery to stop. There was nothing to do but plunge along down the road as helpless as though you were in a millrace. So we went down. Herself was way ahead somewhere. We could see her blue beret occasionally before it got too dark. Down, down, down the road we went in the dark, past chalets that were a burst of lights and Christmas merriment in the dark.

  Then the long line of skiers shot into the black woods, swung to one side to avoid a team and sledge coming up the road, passed more chalets, their windows alight with the candles from Christmas trees. As we dropped past a chalet, watching nothing but the icy road and the man ahead, we heard a shout from the lighted doorway.

  “Captain! Captain! Stop here!”

  It was the German-Swiss landlord of our chalet. We were running past it in the dark.

  Ahead of us, spilled at the turn, we found Herself and we stopped in a sliding slither, knocked loose our skis, and the three of us hiked up the hill toward the lights of the chalet. The lights looked very cheerful against the dark pines of the hill, and inside was a big Christmas tree and a real Christmas dinner, the table shining with silver, the glasses tall and thin-stemmed, the bottles narrow-necked, the turkey large and brown and beautiful, the side dishes all present, and Ida serving in a new crisp apron.

  It was the kind of a Christmas you can only get on top of the world.

  A North-of-Italy Christmas

  Milan, the sprawling, new-old, yellow-brown city of the north, tight-frozen in the December cold.

  Foxes, deer, pheasants, rabbits, hanging before the butcher shops. Cold troops wandering down the streets, from the Christmas leave trains. All the world drinking hot rum punches inside the cafés.

  Officers of every nationality, rank and degree of sobriety crowded into the Cova Café across from the Scala Theater, wishing they were home for Christmas.

  A young lieutenant of Arditi, telling me what Christmas is like in the Abruzzi, where they hunt b
ears, and the men are men, and the women are women.

  The entry of Chink with the great news.

  The great news is that up the Via Manzoni there is a mistletoe shop being run by the youth and beauty of Milan for the benefit of some charity or other.

  We sort out a battle patrol as rapidly as possible, eliminating Italians, inebriates and all ranks above that of major.

  We bear down on the mistletoe shop. The youth and beauty can be plainly seen through the window. A large bush of mistletoe hangs outside. We all enter. Prodigious sales of mistletoe are made. We observe the position. We depart, bearing large quantities of mistletoe, which we give to passing charwomen, beggars, policemen, politicians and cabdrivers.

  We re-enter the shop. We buy more mistletoe. It is a great day for charity. We depart, bearing even larger quantities of mistletoe, which we present to passing journalists, bartenders, street-sweepers and tram conductors.

  We re-enter the shop. By this time the youth and beauty of Milan have become interested. We insist that we must purchase the large bush of mistletoe outside the shop, an empty bank building. We pay a large sum for the bush, and then, in plain sight of the shop window, we insist on presenting it to a very formal-looking man who is passing along the Via Manzoni wearing a top hat and carrying a stick.

  The very formal gentleman refuses the gift. We insist that he take it. He declines. It is too great an honor for him. We inform him that it is a point of honor with us that he accept. It is a little Canadian custom for Christmas. The gentleman wavers.

  We call a cab for the gentleman, all this within plain sight of the shop window, and assist him to enter and place the large mistletoe tree beside him on the seat.

  He drives off with many thanks and in some embarrassment. Many people stop to stare at him.

  By this time the youth and beauty of Milan inside the shop are intrigued.

  We re-enter the shop and in lowered voices explain that in Canada there is a certain custom connected with mistletoe.

  The youth and beauty take us into the back room and introduce us to the chaperones. They are very estimable ladies, the Contessa di This, very large and cheerful, the Principessa di That, very thin and angular and aristocratic. We are led away from the back room and informed in whispers that the chaperones will be going out for tea in one-half an hour.