The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway [14]
“Do you think we’ll find buffalo?” Margot asked, pushing away a dish of apricots.
“Chance of it,” Wilson said and smiled at her. “Why don’t you stay in camp?”
“Not for anything,” she told him.
“Why not order her to stay in camp?” Wilson said to Macomber.
“You order her,” said Macomber coldly.
“Let’s not have any ordering, nor,” turning to Macomber, “any silliness. Francis,” Margot said quite pleasantly.
“Are you ready to start?” Macomber asked.
“Any time,” Wilson told him. “Do you want the Memsahib to go?”
“Does it make any difference whether I do or not?”
The hell with it, thought Robert Wilson. The utter complete hell with it. So this is what it’s going to be like. Well, this is what it’s going to be like, then.
“Makes no difference,” he said.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to stay in camp with her yourself and let me go out and hunt the buffalo?” Macomber asked.
“Can’t do that,” said Wilson. “Wouldn’t talk rot if I were you.”
“I’m not talking rot. I’m disgusted.”
“Bad word, disgusted.”
“Francis, will you please try to speak sensibly,” his wife said.
“I speak too damned sensibly,” Macomber said. “Did you ever eat such filthy food?”
“Something wrong with the food?” asked Wilson quietly.
“No more than with everything else.”
“I’d pull yourself together, laddybuck,” Wilson said very quietly. “There’s a boy waits at table that understands a little English.”
“The hell with him.”
Wilson stood up and puffing on his pipe strolled away, speaking a few words in Swahili to one of the gun-bearers who was standing waiting for him. Macomber and his wife sat on at the table. He was staring at his coffee cup.
“If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling,” Margot said quietly.
“No, you won’t.”
“You can try it and see.”
“You won’t leave me.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you and you’ll behave your self.”
“Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.”
“Yes. Behave yourself.”
“Why don’t you try behaving?”
“I’ve tried it so long. So very long.”
“I hate that red-faced swine,” Macomber said. “I loathe the sight of him.”
“He’s really very nice.”
“Oh, shut up,” Macomber almost shouted. Just then the car came up and stopped in front of the dining tent and the driver and the two gunbearers got out. Wilson walked over and looked at the husband and wife sitting there at the table.
“Going shooting?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Macomber, standing up. “Yes.”
“Better bring a woolly. It will be cool in the car,” Wilson said.
“I’ll get my leather jacket,” Margot said.
“The boy has it,” Wilson told her. He climbed into the front with the driver and Francis Macomber and his wife sat, not speaking, in the back seat.
Hope the silly beggar doesn’t take a notion to blow the back of my head off, Wilson thought to himself. Women are a nuisance on safari.
The car was grinding down to cross the river at a pebbly ford in the gray daylight and then climbed, angling up the steep bank, where Wilson had ordered a way shovelled out the day before so they could reach the parklike wooded rolling country on the far side.
It was a good morning, Wilson thought. There was a heavy dew and as the wheels went through the grass and low bushes he could smell the odor of the crushed fronds. It was an odor like verbena and he liked this early morning smell of the dew, the crushed bracken and the look of the tree trunks showing black through the early morning mist, as the car made its way through the untracked, parklike country. He had put the two in the back seat out of his mind now and was thinking about buffalo. The buffalo that he was after stayed in the daytime in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot, but in the night they fed out into an open stretch of country and if he could come between them and their swamp with the car, Macomber would have a good chance at them in the open. He did not want to hunt buff with Macomber in thick cover. He did not want to