00:00Gates of Imagination presents A Canary for One by Ernest Hemingway
00:06Read by Jacob Rivers
00:08The train passed very quickly a long redstone house with a garden and four thick palm trees
00:16with tables under them in the shade. On the other side was the sea. Then there was a cutting
00:23through redstone and clay, and the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks.
00:29I bought him in Palermo, the American lady said. We only had an hour ashore, and it was Sunday
00:35morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars, and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings
00:41very beautifully. It was very hot in the train, and it was very hot in the lit salon compartment.
00:48There was no breeze came through the open window. The American lady pulled the window blind down,
00:54and there was no more sea, even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the
00:59corridor, then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an oiled road
01:05and flat fields of grapes with graystone hills behind them. There was smoke from many tall
01:11chimneys, coming into Marseille, and the train slowed down and followed one track through many
01:16others into the station. The train stayed 25 minutes in the station at Marseille, and the
01:22American lady bought a copy of the Daily Mail and a half bottle of Evian water. She walked a little
01:27way along the station platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes, where it
01:33stopped for 12 minutes, the train had left with no signal of departure, and she had only gotten on
01:38just in time. The American lady was a little deaf, and she was afraid that perhaps signals of
01:44departure were given and that she did not hear them. The train left the station in Marseille, and there
01:49was not only the switch yards and the factory smoke, but, looking back, the town of Marseille and the
01:54harbor with stone hills behind it and the last of the sun on the water. As it was getting dark, the train
02:00passed a farmhouse burning in a field. Motor cars were stopped along the road, and bedding and things
02:06from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field. Many people were watching the house burn. After it was
02:12dark, the train was in Avignon. People got on and off. At the newsstand, Frenchmen returning to Paris
02:20bought that day's French papers. On the station platform were black soldiers. They wore brown
02:27uniforms and were tall and their faces shone, close under the electric light. Their faces were very black
02:34and they were too tall to stare. The train left Avignon station with the black standing there.
02:42A short white sergeant was with them. Inside the lit salon compartment, the porter had pulled down the
02:48three beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night, the American lady lay
02:55without sleeping because the train was a rapide and went very fast, and she was afraid of the speed in the
03:01night. The American lady's bed was the one next to the window. The canary from Palermo, a cloth spread
03:09over his cage, was out of the draft in the corridor that went into the compartment washroom. There was a
03:15blue light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast and the American lady lay awake
03:21and waited for a wreck. In the morning, the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had come out
03:27from the washroom, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and American in spite of not having slept,
03:33and had taken the cloth off the birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the restaurant
03:38car for breakfast. When she came back to the lit salon compartment again, the beds had been pushed back
03:45into the wall and made into seats. The canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that came through
03:51the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris. He loves the sun, the American lady said. He'll sing now
04:00in a little while. The canary shook his feathers and pecked into them. I've always loved birds, the American lady
04:08said. I'm taking him home to my little girl. There, he's singing now. The canary chirped, and the feathers on his
04:17throat stood out. Then he dropped his bill and pecked into his feathers again. The train crossed a river
04:23and passed through a very carefully tended forest. The train passed through many outside of Paris towns.
04:31There were tramcars in the towns, and big advertisements for the belles jardinières and
04:36Dubonnet and Pernod on the walls toward the train. All that the train passed through looked as though it
04:42were before breakfast. For several minutes, I had not listened to the American lady who was talking
04:47to my wife. Is your husband American too? asked the lady. Yes, said my wife. We're both Americans.
04:58I thought you were English. Oh, no. Perhaps that was because I wore braces, I said. I had started to say
05:07suspenders and changed it to braces in the mouth to keep my English character. The American lady did
05:13not hear. She was really quite deaf. She read lips, and I had not looked toward her. I had looked out
05:21of the window. She went on talking to my wife. I'm so glad you're Americans. American men make the best
05:30husbands, the American lady was saying. That was why we left the continent, you know. My daughter fell in love
05:38with a man in Vevey. She stopped. They were simply madly in love. She stopped again. I took her away, of course.
05:49Did she get over it? asked my wife.
05:52I don't think so, said the American lady. She wouldn't eat anything, and she wouldn't sleep at all.
06:00I've tried so very hard, but she doesn't seem to take an interest in anything.
06:04She doesn't care about things. I couldn't have her marrying a foreigner.
06:10She paused. Someone, a very good friend, told me once.
06:15No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.
06:20No, said my wife. I suppose not.
06:25The American lady admired my wife's traveling coat, and it turned out that the American lady
06:31had bought her own clothes for twenty years now from the same Maison de Couturier in the Rue Saint-Honoré.
06:38They had her measurements, and a vendeuse who knew her and her taste picked the dresses out for her,
06:43and they were sent to America. They came to the post office near where she lived uptown in New York,
06:49and the duty was never exorbitant because they opened the dresses there in the post office to
06:54appraise them, and they were always very simple looking and with no gold lace nor ornaments that
06:59would make the dresses look expensive. Before the present vendeuse, named Thérèse, there had been
07:05another vendeuse, named Amélie. Altogether, there had only been these two in the twenty years.
07:11It had always been the same couturier. Prices, however, had gone up. The exchange, though,
07:19equalized that. They had her daughter's measurements now, too. She was grown up,
07:24and there was not much chance of their changing now. The train was now coming into Paris.
07:30The fortifications were leveled, but grass had not grown. There were many cars standing on tracks,
07:36brown wooden restaurant cars and brown wooden sleeping cars that would go to Italy at five o'clock
07:42that night, if that train still left at five. The cars were marked Paris-Rome, and cars with seats on
07:50the roofs that went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all the seats
07:57and on the roofs. If that were the way, it were still done. And passing were the white walls and
08:04many windows of houses. Nothing had eaten any breakfast. Americans make the best husbands,
08:11the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. American men are the only men in the
08:18world to marry. How long ago did you leave Vevey? asked my wife. Two years ago this fall. It's her,
08:27you know, that I'm taking the canary to. Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?
08:34Yes, said the American lady. He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer.
08:41They met there in Vevey. They used to go on long walks together.
08:44I know Vevey, said my wife. We were there on our honeymoon. Were you really? That must have been
08:54lovely. I had no idea, of course, that she'd fall in love with him. It was a very lovely place,
09:01said my wife. Yes, said the American lady. Isn't it lovely? Where did you stop there?
09:08We stayed at the Trois Couronnes, said my wife. It's such a fine old hotel, said the American lady.
09:17Yes, said my wife. We had a very fine room, and in the fall the country was lovely.
09:23Were you there in the fall? Yes, said my wife. We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck.
09:30They were splintered open and the roof sagged in. Look, I said, there's been a wreck.
09:37The American lady looked and saw the last car. I was afraid of just that all night, she said.
09:45I have terrific presentiments about things sometimes. I'll never travel on a repeat again
09:51at night. There must be other comfortable trains that don't go so fast.
09:56Then the train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons, and then stopped and porters came up to the
10:02windows. I handed bags through the windows, and we were out on the dim longness of the platform,
10:09and the American lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook's who said,
10:14Just a moment, madam, and I'll look for your name.
10:18The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage, and my wife said goodbye, and I said goodbye to the
10:24American lady, whose name had been found by the man from Cook's on a typewritten page in a
10:30sheaf of typewritten pages, which he replaced in his pocket. We followed the porter with the
10:35truck down the long cement platform beside the train. At the end was a gate, and a man took the
10:40tickets. We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.
10:45Thank you so much for listening to this audiobook. If you enjoyed the story, feel free to like,
10:54subscribe, and explore the channel for more captivating tales. See you in the next recording.
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