ENCOUNTER We were sitting about taking coffee in the aerodrome
café at Copenhagen where everything was brilliance and comfort and stylish to the point of tedium.
The old man suddenly appeared or rather happened like an event of nature, in an ordinary greenish anorak his face scarred by the salt and burning wind, ploughing a furrow through the crowded room and walking like a sailor from the wheel.
His beard was like the white foam of the sea brimming and glistening around his face.
His gruffness and his winner's certainty sent up a wave around him as he walked through the old fashions aping modern fashions and modern fashions aping old fashions.
He in his open collar and rough shirt stepping aside from vermouth and pernrid stood at the bar demanding Russian vodka and waving away soda with a 'No.'
He with the scars marking his tanned forearms his filthy trousers and his noisy shoes had better style than anyone in the crowd.
The solid ground seemed to quiver under the heavy authority of that tread.
Somebody smiled across: 'Look at that!
you'd think that was Hemingway,' he said.
Expressed in details of his short gestures and heavy motions of his fisherman's walk.
He was a statue sketched in a rough rock, one treading down bullets and centuries,
one walking like a man hunched in a trench,
pushing aside people and furniture.
It was the very image of Hemingway.
Later 1 heard that it was Hemingway.
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