L'Envoi

by Ernest Hemingway

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. "This is the queen," he said. She was clipping a rose bush. "Oh, how do you do," she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whisky and soda. "We have good whisky anyway," he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. "Plastiras is a very good man, I believe," he said, "but frightfully difficult. I think he did right, though, shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course, the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself."

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.