The story starts with the narrator describing the location where the story happens. The image given by the narrator is like an extensive white land which is too bare and unprotected against the Sun to enclose a romantic scene. The no-name, no-identity characters have only forty minutes to rescue the monarchy of desertedness before their saviour, the train, comes to take them to the promised land. There is supposedly just one refuge at the moment and it is the feeble support of a building near the station, thus they enter and a conversation starts which goes on for the whole rest of the story.
The interesting thing about Hemingway’s way of storytelling is that he relates the commonest daily conversations in a way that not only they don’t strain the brain but also they are not boring. The tone of this conversation can be described as unfriendly in general. The girl wants to romanticize the experience and make the scene memorable while the man’s appetite has nothing to do with romance so the girl feels insulted or ignored and takes up a satirical tone at some point when she comments: “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” At this point she also refers to “the thing” indirectly for the first time in the story. And “the thing” is mainly there to let them have more fun as the man says here.
Again, at line 35 the girl tries to romanticize but the man ignores her. But suddenly a few lines further he comments on the beer in a nice manner which is welcomed by the girl’s positive reply. The man, though, is only after “the thing” which he calls operation and not even an operation. Their conversation goes on and on around the same topic of “the thing” without really directly clarifying the nature of it to the reader. Between line 60 to 65 the man says that he is worried then he says that he is not worried, the expression of which shows how seriously anxious he is.
The girl leaves the table and at this point the surroundings are no more frightening and unprotected, but there are trees, grains, mountains and a river in her prospect. Some hopes apparently arose in her and she knows that she is the one who by doing “the thing” kills them all. The man pretends to be hopeful for a wonderful future but he is trying to be persuasive.
When they return to the table, the girl’s prospect gets back to the hopeless side of the valley, and the man gets more and more practical, looking at her and trying to coax her to do “the thing”, indirectly. At this point in the story, the nearest inference that comes to mind is that the two has slept with each other more than once and unexpectedly the girl got pregnant so now the man who is probably much older than her wants to get rid of the bothersome child via abortion. The girl asks the man to stop talking in a very childish manner by repeating “please” seven times in a row, and by saying that she’ll scream if keeps on talking. She is so lost in her thoughts that she doesn’t hear the woman who tells them about the train’s arrival. The man probably has another family elsewhere or a kind of secret life which he aims to save and hide at the same time. Both feel better after a few minutes of being away from each other which seems to have helped them make their mind. The story is open-ended so the author doesn’t say what their final decision is.
