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 second-hand 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 on to Queen street went the reporter, and into the first second-hand 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 door bells, 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?”
“Sort of,” said the reporter.
“Don’t you bother with it, then. Them things are no good!”
In succession the reporter visited five more second-hand 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 asked.
“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 40 cents for his cigaret 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 to-day.”
“Make me any kind of an offer. Those are good medals, mister. 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 second-hand 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.
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 pine wood 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 ski-ing 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 ski-ing 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 low-ceilinged 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. Ski-ing 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 Chri
stmas 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 towards 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 the 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 flat car hooked on to a jerky little train that ran straight up the side of the mountain on cog wheels.
At the top we could look 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 bob sled 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 seal-skin harnessed on our skis, running back from the tip to the base in a straight strip with the grain of the hair pointing back, so that you pushed right ahead through the snow going up hill. If your skis had a tendency to slide back the slipping movement would be checked by the seal skin hairs. They would slide 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 zig-zag.
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 up-hill 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 ruck-sacks coming up, unpacked the lunch and the bottle of white wine, and lay back on our ruck-sacks and soaked in the sun. Coming up we had been wearing sun glasses 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 yet been willing to use that famous mountaineer’s specific against snow-blindness and sun-burn.
It was no time after lunch and Herself’s daily nap, while Chink and I practised 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 seal skins 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 on to the road on the shoulder of the mountain where the cog-wheel railway had stopped coming up. Now we were all a shooting stream of ski-ers. 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 mill race. 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 dusk, past chalets that were a burst of lights and Christmas merriment in the dark.
Then the long line of ski-ers 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 the 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 towards 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 turkey dinner, the table shiny 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 cafes.
Officers of every nationality, rank and degree of sobriety crowded into the Cova cafe across from the Scala theatre, wishing they were home for Christmas.
A young lieutenant of Arditi, telling me what Christmas is like in the Abruzzi, “where they hunt bears 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 cab-drivers.
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, bar-tenders, 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.
We depart bearing vast quantities of mistletoe, which we present, formally, to the head waiter of the Grand d’Italia restaurant. The waiter is touched by this Canadian custom and makes a fitting response.
We leave, chewing cloves, for the mistletoe shop. Under the small remaining quantity of mistletoe we demonstrate the sacred Canadian custom. Eventually the chaperones return. We are warned by a whistle up the street.
Thus the true use of mistletoe was brought to Northern Italy.
CHRISTMAS IN PARIS
PARIS with the snow falling. Paris with the big charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red. At the cafe tables, men huddled, their coat collars turned up, while they finger glasses of grog Americain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.
The buses rumble like green juggernauts through the snow that sifts down in the dusk. White house walls rise through the dusky snow. Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk.
It is very beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.
The young man and his girl walk up the Rue Bonaparte from the Quai in the shadow of the tall houses to the brightly lighted little Rue Jacob. In a little second floor restaurant. The Veritable Restaurant of the Third Republic, which has two rooms, four tiny tables and a cat, there is a special Christmas dinner being served.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 13