Marjorie
The girl Nick Adams has been going with, and the better fisherman of the two. "The End of Something" is the evening he ends it.
To keep going as they are. Told that it isn't fun any more, she does not argue. She asks him one question, whether love is any fun either, and when he says no she stands up and takes the boat.
The book
At a glance
- "The End of Something"; discussed at length, in her absence, in "The Three Day Blow"
- Marjorie in her own story; Marge by Nick and Bill in the next one
- Rowing, baiting, reading the water, and asking the question Nick is avoiding
- Never appears; Bill reports that she is sore as hell and had been telling people the two were engaged
- Nick had talked to her about going to Italy together
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMarjorie is a young woman in the Michigan lake country who has been going with Nick Adams, and who is the other half of "The End of Something" — a story about nine pages long in which the two of them set night lines for trout and he ends the relationship. Nick and his friend Bill both call her Marge.
Hemingway gives her the competence in the story. She rows, she baits, she reads the water, and she is the one who forces the conversation Nick is avoiding. The decision is his, but nearly everything that actually happens in the story is something she does.
How the book draws them
- She fishes, and likes itThe story says so twice in a row, in the flattest way available: "She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick." She stays intent on the rod the whole time they are trolling, even while she is talking.
- She can handle the boatShe rows out over the channel bank holding the line in her teeth, drops the baits on Nick's signal, comes back in, and runs the second line out the same way. Then she rows up the point so as not to disturb the lines and pulls hard enough to put the boat well up the beach.
- The one thing Nick correctsShe catches a perch out of the bait pail with her hands, cuts its head off and skins it. Nick looks at her fish and tells her she shouldn't have taken the ventral fin out — it will do, but it is better with the fin in. It is the only thing in the story she does not do to his satisfaction.
- The ruinRowing past the white limestone foundations of the sawmill that closed when the timber ran out, Marjorie says, "There’s our old ruin, Nick," as they pass it. She asks whether he can remember it working, and then offers her own reading of it: it seems more like a castle. Nick says nothing at all, and cuts across the bay.
- She makes him say itNick starts needling her — she knows everything, he has taught her everything — and she tells him to cut it out. Then, watching the moon come up, she refuses to let it drop: she tells him he doesn't have to talk silly, asks what is really the matter, refuses "I don't know," and says, "Go on and say it."
- She leaves firstWhen he finally says it, she does not cry or argue. She stands up and tells him she is taking the boat: "You can walk back around the point." He offers to push it off for her and she declines that too. Nick lies down with his face in the blanket and listens to her rowing away across the moonlit water.
She does not come back. Bill's consolation is that she can now marry somebody of her own sort — a line the story sets down without comment and lets the reader weigh.