ACROSS the RIVER and INTO the TREES by ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“Listen, daughter,” he said. “Don’t be sorry for me.”

“I’m not. Not at all. I just love you.”

“It isn’t much of a trade is it?” He said oficio instead of trade, because they spoke Spanish together too, when they left French, and when they did not wish to speak English before other people. Spanish is a rough language, the Colonel thought, rougher than a corncob sometimes. But you can say what you mean in it and make it stick.

“Es un oficio bastante malo,” he repeated, “loving me.”

“Yes. But it is the only one I have.”

“Don’t you write any more poetry?”

“It was young girl poetry. Like young girl painting. Everyone is talented at a certain age.”

At what age do you become old in this country, the Colonel thought. No one is ever old in Venice, but they grow up very fast. I grew up very rapidly in the Veneto myself, and I was never as old as I was at twenty-one.

“How is your mother?” he asked, lovingly.

“She is very well. She does not receive and she sees almost no one because of her sorrow.”

“Do you think she would mind if we had a baby?”

“I don’t know. She is very intelligent, you know. But I would have to marry someone, I suppose. I don’t really want to.”

“We could be married.”

“No,” she said. “I thought it over, and I thought we should not. It is just a decision as the one about crying.”

“Maybe you make wrong decisions. Christ knows I’ve made a few and too many men are dead from when I was wrong.”

“I think, perhaps, you exaggerate. I don’t believe you made many wrong decisions.”

“Not many,” the Colonel said. “But enough. Three is plenty in my trade, and I made all three.”

“I’d like to know about them.”

“They’d bore you,” the Colonel told her. “They beat the hell out of me to remember them. So what would they do to some outsider?”

“Am I an outsider?”

“No. You’re my true love. My last and only and true love.”

“Did you make them early or late? The decisions.”

“I made them early. In the middle. And late.”

“Wouldn’t you tell me about them? I would like to have a share in your sad trade.”

“The hell with them,” the Colonel said. “They were made and they’ve all been paid for. Only you can’t pay for that.”

“Can you tell me about that and why?”

“No,” the Colonel said. And that was the end of that.

“Then let’s have fun.”

“Let’s,” the Colonel said. “With our one and only life.”

“Maybe there are others. Other lives.”

“I don’t think so,” the Colonel said. “Turn your head sideways, beauty.”

“Like this?”

“Like that,” the Colonel said. “Exactly like that.”

So, the Colonel thought, here we come into the last round and I do not know even the number of the round. I have loved but three women and have lost them thrice.

You lose them the same way you lose a battalion; by errors of judgment; orders that are impossible to fulfill, and through impossible conditions. Also through bru­tality.

I have lost three battalions in my life and three women and now I have a fourth, and loveliest, and where the hell does it end?

You tell me, General, and, incidentally, while we are discussing the matter, and it is a frank discussion of the situation and in no sense a Council of War, as you have so often pointed out to me General: GENERAL WHERE IS YOUR CAVALRY?

I have thought so, he said to himself. The Command­ing Officer does not know where his cavalry is, and his cavalry are not completely accurate as to their situation, nor their mission, and they will, some of them, enough, muck off as cavalry have always mucked off in all the wars since they, the Cavalry, had the big horses.

“Beauty,” he said, “Ma très chère et bien aimée. I am very dull and I am sorry.”

“You are never dull, to me, and I love you and I only wish we could be cheerful tonight.”

“We damn well will be,” said the Colonel. “Do you know anything particular we should be cheerful about?”

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