Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

You really can start it all over now. You really can. Please don’t be silly, another part of him said. You really can, he said to himself. You can be just as good a guy as she thinks you are and as you are at this moment. There is such a thing as starting it all over and you’ve been given a chance to and you can do it and you will do it. Will you make all the promises again? Yes. If necessary I will make all the promises and I will keep them. Not all the promises? Knowing you have broken them? He could not say anything to that. You mustn’t be a crook before you start. No. I mustn’t. Say what you can truly do each day and then do it. Each day. Do it a day at a time and keep each day’s promises to her and to yourself. That way I can start it all new, he thought, and still be straight.

You’re getting to be an awful moralist, he thought. If you don’t watch out you will bore her. When weren’t you always a moralist? At different times. Don’t fool yourself. Well, at different places then. Don’t fool yourself.

All right, Conscience, he said. Only don’t be so solemn and didactic. Get a load of this, Conscience old friend, I know how useful and important you are and how you could have kept me out of all the trouble I have been in but couldn’t you have a little lighter touch about it? I know that conscience speaks in italics but sometimes you seem to speak in very boldfaced Gothic script. I would take it just as well from you, Conscience, if you did not try to scare me; just as I would consider the Ten Commandments just as seriously if they were not presented as graven on stone tablets. You know. Conscience, it has been a long time since we were frightened by the thunder. Now with the lightning: There you have something. But the thunder doesn’t impress us so much any more. I’m trying to help you, you son of a bitch, his conscience said.

The girl was still sleeping and they were coming up the hill into Tallahassee. She will probably wake when we stop at the first light, he thought. But she did not and he drove through the old town and turned off to the left on U.S. 319 straight south and into the beautiful wooded country that ran down toward the Gulf Coast.

There’s one thing about you, daughter, he thought. Not only can you outsleep anybody I’ve ever known and have the best appetite I’ve ever seen linked with a build like yours but you have an absolutely heaven-given ability to not have to go to the bathroom.

Their room was on the fourteenth floor and it was not very cool. But with the fans on and the windows open it was better and when the bellboy had gone out Helena said, “Don’t be disappointed, darling. Please. It’s lovely.”

“I thought I could get you an air-conditioned one.”

“They’re awful to sleep in really. Like being in a vault. This will be fine.”

“We could have tried the other two. But they know me there.”

“They’ll know us both here now. What’s our name?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Harris.”

“That’s a splendid name. We must try to live up to it. Do you want to bathe first?”

“No. You.”

“All right. I’m going to really bathe though.”

“Go ahead. Go to sleep in the tub if you want.”

“I may. I didn’t sleep all day did I?”

“You were wonderful. There was some pretty dull going too.”

“It wasn’t bad. Lots of it was lovely. But New Orleans isn’t really the way I thought it would be. Did you always know it was so flat and dull? I don’t know what I expected. Marseilles I suppose. And to see the river.”

“It’s only to eat and drink in. The part right around here doesn’t look so bad at night. It’s really sort of nice.”

“Let’s not go out until it’s dark. It’s all right around here. Some of it is lovely.”

“We’ll have that and then, in the morning, we’ll be on our way.”

“That only leaves time for one meal.”

“That’s all right. We’ll come back in cold weather when we can really eat. Darling,” she said. “This is the first sort of letdown we’ve had. So let’s not let it let us down. We’ll have long baths and some drinks and a meal twice as expensive as we can afford and we’ll go to bed and make wonderful love.”

“The hell with New Orleans in the movies,” Roger said. “We’ll have New Orleans in bed.”

“Eat first. Didn’t you order some White Rock and ice?”

“Yes. Do you want a drink?”

“No. I was just worried about you.”

“It will be along,” Roger said. There was a knock at the door. “Here it is. You get started on the tub.”

“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said. “There will just be my nose out of water and the tips of my breasts maybe and my toes and I’m going to have it just as cold as it will run.”