Read Online In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway - Free Book Online

dear boy?”
    â€œNo,” Krebs said.
    His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.
    â€œI don’t love anybody,” Krebs said.
    It wasn’t any good. He couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t make her see it. It was silly to have said it. He had only hurt her. He went over and took hold of her arm. She was crying with her head in her hands.
    â€œI didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was just angry at something. I didn’t mean I didn’t love you.”
    His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.
    â€œCan’t you believe me, mother?”
    His mother shook her head.
    â€œPlease, please, mother. Please believe me.”
    â€œAll right,” his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. “I believe you, Harold.”
    Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him.
    â€œI’m your mother,” she said. “I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby.”
    Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.
    â€œI know, Mummy,” he said. “I’ll try and be a good boy for you.”
    â€œWould you kneel and pray with me, Harold?” his mother asked.
    They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs’s mother prayed.
    â€œNow, you pray, Harold,” she said.
    â€œI can’t,” Krebs said.
    â€œTry, Harold.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œDo you want me to pray for you?”
    â€œYes.”
    So his mother prayed for him and then they stood up and Krebs kissed his mother and went out of the house. He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene maybe before he got away. He would not go down to his father’s office. He would miss that one. He wanted his life to go smoothly. It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over now, anyway. He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor baseball.

Chapter VIII
    At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevitts got frightened when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.
    â€”They’re crooks, ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops, ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?
    â€”That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?
    Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.

The Revolutionist
    In 1919 he was travelling on the railroads in Italy, carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under the Whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way. He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.
    He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country, he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked much, and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti. Mantegna he did not like.
    He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good trip together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had