The financier was a very literal man. His idea of showing Bill the fishing was for Bill to watch and the financier to fish. They started out. It was a trying sight.
If undressed and put back on the shelf piece by piece the financier would have stocked a sporting goods store. Placed end to end his collection of flies would have reached from Keokuk, Ill., to Paris, Ont. The price of his rod would have made a substantial dent in the interallied debt or served to foment a central American revolution.
The financier flung a pretty poisonous fly, too. At the end of two hours one trout had been caught. The financier was elated. The trout was a beauty, fully five and a half inches long and perfectly proportioned. The only trouble with him was some funny black spots along his sides and belly.
“I don’t believe he’s healthy,” Bill said doubtfully.
“Healthy? You don’t think he’s healthy? That lovely trout? Why, he’s a wonder. Did you not see the terrific fight he made before I netted him?” The financier was enraged. The beautiful trout lay in his large, fat hand.
“But what are those black spots?” Bill asked.
“Those spots? Oh, absolutely nothing. Perhaps worms. Who can say? All of our trout here have them at this season. But do not be afraid of that, Monsieur Zshones. Wait until you taste this beautiful trout for your breakfast!”
It was probably the proximity to Deauville that spoiled the financier’s trout stream. Deauville is supposed to be a sort of combination of Fifth Avenue, Atlantic City, and Sodom and Gomorrah. In reality it is a watering place that has become so famous that the really smart people no longer go to it and the others hold a competitive spending contest and mistake each other for duchesses, dukes, prominent pugilists, Greek millionaires and the Dolly sisters.
The real trout fishing of Europe is in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. Spain has probably the best fishing of all in Galicia. But the Germans and the Swiss are right behind.
In Germany the great difficulty is to get permission to fish. All the fishing water is rented by the year to individuals. If you want to fish you have first to get permission of the man who has rented the fishing. Then you go back to the township and get a permission, and then you finally get the permission of the owner of the land.
If you have only two weeks to fish, it will probably take about all of it to get these different permissions. A much easier way is simply to carry a rod with you and fish when you see a good stream. If anyone complains, begin handing out marks. If the complaints keep up, keep handing out marks. If this policy is pursued far enough the complaints will eventually cease and you will be allowed to continue fishing.
If, on the other hand, your supply of marks runs out before the complaints cease you will probably go either to jail or the hospital. It is a good plan, on this account, to have a dollar bill secreted somewhere in your clothes. Produce the dollar bill. It is ten to one your assailant will fall to his knees in an attitude of extreme thanksgiving and on arising break all existing records to the nearest, deepest and wooliest German hand knitted sock, the south German’s savings bank.
Following this method of obtaining fishing permits, we fished all through the Black Forest. With rucksacks and fly-rods, we hiked across country, sticking to the high ridges and the rolling crests of the hills, sometimes through deep pine timber, sometimes coming out into a clearing and farmyards and again going, for miles, without seeing a soul except occasional wild looking berry pickers. We never knew where we were. But we were never lost because at any time we could cut down from the high country into a valley and know we would hit a stream. Sooner or later every stream flowed into a river and a river meant a town.
At night we stopped in little inns or gasthofs. Some of these were so far from civilization that the innkeepers did not know the mark was rapidly becoming worthless and continued to charge the old German prices. At one place, room and board, in Canadian money, were less than ten cents a day.
One day we started from Triberg and toiled up a long, steadily ascending hill road until we were on top of the high country and could look out at the Black Forest rolling away from us in every direction. Away off across country we could see a range of hills, and we figured that at their base must flow a river. We cut across the high, bare country, dipping down into valleys and walking through woods, cool and dim as a cathedral on the hot August day. Finally we hit the upper end of the valley at the foot of the hills we had seen.
In it flowed a lovely trout stream and there was not a farmhouse in sight. I jointed up the rod, and while Mrs. Hemingway sat under a tree on the hillside and kept watch both ways up the valley, caught four real trout. They averaged about three-quarters of a pound apiece. Then we moved down the valley. The stream broadened out and Herself took the rod while I found a look-out post.
She caught six in about an hour, and two of them I had to come down and net for her. She had hooked a big one, and after he was triumphantly netted we looked up to see an old German in peasant clothes watching us from the road.
“Gut tag,” I said.
“Tag,” he said. “Have you good fishing?”
“Yes. Very good.”
“Good,” he said. “It is good to have somebody fishing.” And went hiking along the road.
In contrast to him were the farmers in Ober-Prechtal, where we had obtained full fishing permits, who came down and chased us away from the stream with pitchforks because we were Auslanders.
In Switzerland I discovered two valuable things about trout fishing. The first was while I was fishing a stream that parallels the Rhone river and that was swollen and grey with snow water. Flies were useless, and I was fishing with a big gob of worms. A fine, juicy-looking bait. But I wasn’t getting any trout or even any strikes.
An old Italian who had a farm up the valley was walking behind me while I fished. As there was nothing doing in a stream I knew from experience was full of trout, it got more and more irritating. Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl. Finally I sat down and waited for the Italian to go away. He sat down, too.
He was an old man, with a face like a leather water bottle.
“Well, Papa, no fish to-day,” I said.
“Not for you,” he said solemnly.
“Why not for me? For you, maybe?” I said.
“Oh yes,” he said, not smiling. “For me trout always. Not for you. You don’t know how to fish with worms.” And spat into the stream.
This touched a tender spot, a boyhood spent within forty miles of the Soo, hoisting out trout with a cane pole and all the worms the hook would hold.
“You’re so old you know everything. You are probably a rich man from your knowledge of fishworms,” I said.
This bagged him.
“Give me the rod,” he said.
He took it from me, cleaned off the fine wriggling gob of trout food, and selected one medium-sized angleworm from my box. This he threaded a little way on the number 10 hook, and let about three-fourths of the worm wave free.
“Now that’s a worm,” he said with satisfaction.
He reeled the line up till there was only the six feet of leader out and dropped the free swinging worm into a pool where the stream swirled under the bank. There was nothing doing. He pulled it slowly out and dropped it in a little lower down. The tip of the rod twisted. He lowered it just a trifle. Then it shot down in a jerk, and he struck and horsed out a 15-inch trout and sent him back over his head in a telephone pole swing.
I fell on him while he was still flopping.
The old Italian handed me the rod. “There, young one. That is the way to use a worm. Let him be free to move like a worm. The trout will take the free end and then suck him all in, hook and all. I have fished this stream for twenty years and I know. More than one worm scares the fish. It must be natural.”
“Come, use the rod and fish now,” I urged him.
“No. No. I only fish at night,” he smiled. “I
t is much too expensive to get a permit.”
But by my watching for the river guard while he fished and our using the rod alternately until each caught a fish, we fished all day and caught 18 trout. The old Italian knew all the holes, and only fished where there were big ones. We used a free wriggling worm, and the 18 trout averaged a pound and a half apiece.
He also showed me how to use grubs. Grubs are only good in clear water, but are a deadly bait. You can find them in any rotten tree or sawlog, and the Swiss and Swiss-Italians keep them in grub boxes. Flat pieces of wood bored full of auger holes with a sliding metal top. The grub will live as well in his hole in the wood as in the log and is one of the greatest hot weather baits known. Trout will take a grub when they will take nothing else in the low water days of August.
The Swiss, too, have a wonderful way of cooking trout. They boil them in a liquor made of wine vinegar, bay leaves, and a dash of red pepper. Not too much of any of the ingredients in the boiling water, and cook until the trout turns blue. It preserves the true trout flavor better than almost any way of cooking. The meat stays firm and pink and delicate. Then they serve them with drawn butter. They drink the clear Sion wine when they eat them.
It is not a well-known dish at the hotels. You have to go back in the country to get trout cooked that way. You come up from the stream to a chalet and ask them if they know how to cook blue trout. If they don’t you walk on a way. If they do, you sit down on the porch with the goats and the children and wait. Your nose will tell you when the trout are boiling. Then after a little while you will hear a pop. That is the Sion being uncorked. Then the woman of the chalet will come to the door and say, “It is prepared, Monsieur.”
Then you can go away and I will do the rest myself.
Inflation and the German Mark
The Toronto Star Weekly • DECEMBER 8, 1923
“Now if any gentleman needs his quarter for a meal or a bed—”
The barker stood in a narrow alley opposite Osgoode Hall, Toronto. In front of him was a soap box with a few envelopes of foreign money.
In front of the soap box stood a crowd of out-of-workers, shifting from foot to foot in the mud, and listening dull-eyed to the spellbinder.
“As I say,” went on the barker, moistening his lips under his grey mustache, “if a gentleman has an immediate need for his quarter, I don’t want it. But if he is prepared to make an investment, I am offering him the chance to make himself rich for life.
“Only a quarter, gentlemen. Just one Canadian quarter, and Russia is bound to come back. A quarter buys this 250,000 Soviet ruble note. Who’ll buy one?”
Nobody seemed on the point of buying. But they all listened to him perfectly seriously.
It was the Russian ruble, the Austrian kronen and German mark, not worth the paper they are printed on, making a last stand as serious money in Toronto’s Ward.
“In normal times this note I hold here is worth about $125,000. Suppose it goes up to where the ruble is worth only one cent. You will have $2,500. You can walk right into a bank and get $2,500 for this one note.”
One man’s eyes shone and he moistened his lips.
The barker lifted the little pink bit of worthless paper up and looked at it lovingly.
“And Russia is coming back, gentlemen. Every day her money gets more valuable. Don’t let anyone tell you Russia isn’t coming back. Once a country gets to be a republic she stays that way, gentlemen. Look at France. She’s been a republic a long time.”
A man in the front row in an old army coat nodded. Another man scratched his neck.
The barker drew out a big blue-green bill and laid it alongside the Russian ruble note.
No one explained to the listening men that the cheap looking Russian money had been printed in million-ruble denominations as fast as the presses could work in order to wipe out the value of the old imperial money and in consequence the money holding class. Now the Soviet has issued rubles backed by gold. None of these are in the hands of the barkers.
“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 Poincare is weakening. He’s weakening, and the mark will come back, too.”
He was Coue-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 for a dollar and get them. None of these marks are worth any more than any others. Except as pieces of paper for wall papering 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 Versailles,” 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 soap box 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-storey 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 to-day the Austrian crown is worth .00141/2 cents. In other words, about 14 cents for 10,000 kronen. At one dollar for 10,000, 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 to-day. 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 $2. 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.
No gentleman offered.
“I won’t deny I have rivals,” the spieler 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 $1.”
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 $50 right off the bat.”
But a dollar was out of the class of the investors present.
Reluctantly the soap box merchant went back to the more moderate amounts.
“Now if a man wants to invest a quarter,” he commenced, and held up one of the pink paper 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 glittering windows of cheap rings, junk shops, two-bit barber shops, second-hand clothing stores, and street hawkers, in search of the valor mart.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 12