PAGE 7
The Men Of Zanzibar
by
Her eyes were filled with sudden tears, and so wonderful was the light in them that for one mad moment Hemingway thought they were tears of happiness. But the light died, and what had been tears became only wet drops of water, and he saw to his dismay that she was most miserable.
The girl moved ahead of him to the cliff on which the agency stood, and which overhung the harbor and the Indian Ocean. Her eyes were filled with trouble. As she raised them to his they begged of him to be kind.
“I am glad you told me,” she said. “I have been afraid it was coming. But until you told me I could not say anything. I tried to stop you. I was rude and unkind–“
“You certainly were,” Hemingway agreed cheerfully. “And the more you would have nothing to do with me, the more I admired you. And then I learned to admire you more, and then to love you. It seems now as though I had always known and always loved you. And now this is what we are going to do.”
He wouldn’t let her speak; he rushed on precipitately.
“We are first going up to the house to get your typewriting-machine, and we will bring it back here and hurl it as far as we can off this cliff. I want to see the splash! I want to hear it smash when it hits that rock. It has been my worst enemy, because it helped you to be independent of me, because it kept you from me. Time after time, on the veranda, when I was pretending to listen to Lady Firth, I was listening to that damned machine banging and complaining and tiring your pretty fingers and your dear eyes. So first it has got to go. You have been its slave, now I am going to be your slave. You have only to rub the lamp and things will happen. And because I’ve told you nothing about myself, you mustn’t think that the money that helps to make them happen is ‘tainted.’ It isn’t. Nor am I, nor my father, nor my father’s father. I am asking you to marry a perfectly respectable young man. And, when you do–“
Again he gave her no opportunity to interrupt, but rushed on impetuously: “We will sail away across that ocean to wherever you will take me. To Ceylon and Tokio and San Francisco, to Naples and New York, to Greece and Athens. They are all near. They are all yours. Will you accept them and me?” He smiled appealingly, but most miserably. For though he had spoken lightly and with confidence, it was to conceal the fact that he was not at all confident. As he had read in her eyes her refusal of his pony, he had read, even as he spoke, her refusal of himself. When he ceased speaking the girl answered:
“If I say that what you tell me makes me proud, I am saying too little.” She shook her head firmly, with an air of finality that frightened Hemingway. “But what you ask–what you suggest is impossible.”
“You don’t like me?” said Hemingway.
“I like you very much,” returned the girl, “and, if I don’t seem unhappy that it can’t be, it is because I always have known it can’t be–“
“Why can’t it be?” rebelled Hemingway. “I don’t mean that I can’t understand your not wanting to marry me, but if I knew your objection, maybe, I could beat it down.”
Again, with the same air of finality, the girl moved her head slowly, as though considering each word; she began cautiously.
“I cannot tell you the reason,” she said, “because it does not concern only myself.”
“If you mean you care for some one else,” pleaded Hemingway, “that does not frighten me at all.” It did frighten him extremely, but, believing that a faint heart never won anything, he pretended to be brave.