“I don’t understand that at all.”
“Too hard to explain,” the Colonel said. Then, “No. Of course it isn’t. Making things clear is my main trade. The hell with being too hard to explain. It is like professional football, calcio, What you win in Milano you lose in Torino.”
“I don’t care about football.”
“Neither do I,” the Colonel said. “Especially not about the Army and Navy game and when the very high brass speaks in terms of American football so they can understand, themselves, what they are talking of.”
“I think we will have a good time tonight. Even under the circumstances, whatever they are.”
“Should we take this new bottle in the gondola?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “But with deep glasses. I’ll tell the Gran Maestro. Let’s get our coats and go.”
“Good. I’ll take some of this medicine and sign for the G.M. and we’ll go.”
“I wish it was me taking the medicine instead of you.”
“I’m glad as hell it isn’t,” the Colonel said. “Should we pick our gondola or have them bring one to the landing?”
“Let’s gamble and have them bring one to the landing. What do we have to lose?”
“Nothing, I guess. Probably nothing.”
CHAPTER XIII
THEY went out the side door of the hotel to the imbarcadero and the wind hit them. The light from the hotel shone on the blackness of the gondola and made the water green. She looks as lovely as a good horse or as a racing shell, the Colonel thought. Why have I never seen a gondola before? What hand or eye framed that dark-ed symmetry?
“Where should we go?” the girl asked.
Her hair, in the light from the hotel door and window, as she stood on the dock by the black gondola, was blowing back in die wind, so she looked like the figure-head on a ship. The rest of it, too, the Colonel thought.
“Let’s just ride through the park,” the Colonel said. “Or through the Bois with the top down. Let him take us out to Armenonville.”
“Will we go to Paris?”
“Sure,” the Colonel said. “Tell him to take us for an hour where the going is easiest. I don’t want to drive him into that wind.”
“The tide is quite high with this wind,” the girl said. “Some of our places he couldn’t get under the bridges. May I tell him where to go?”
“Of course, Daughter.”
“Stow that ice bucket aboard,” the Colonel said to the second waiter, who had come out with them.
“The Gran Maestro said to tell you, as you embarked, that this bottle of wine was his present.”
“Thank him properly and tell him he can’t do that.”
“He had better go into the wind a little first,” the girl said. “Then I know how he should go.”
“The Gran Maestro sent this,” the second waiter said.
It was a folded, old U. S. O. D. blanket. Renata was talking to the gondoliere, her hair blowing. The gondoliere wore a heavy blue navy sweater and he was bareheaded too.
“Thank him,” the Colonel said.
He slipped a bill into the second waiter’s hand. The second waiter returned it. “You already made the notation on the check. Neither you nor I nor the Gran Maestro are starving.”
“What about the moglie and the bambini?”
“I don’t have that. Your mediums smacked our house in Treviso.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be,” the second waiter said. “You were a foot soldier as I was.”
“Permit me to be sorry.”
“Sure,” the second waiter said. “And what the hell difference does it make? Be happy, my Colonel, and be happy, my Lady.”
They got down into the gondola and there was the same magic, as always, of the light hull, and the sudden displacement that you made, and then the trimming in the dark privacy, and then the second trimming, as the gondoliere started to scull, laying her partly on her side so that he would have more control.
“Now,” the girl said. “We are in our home and I love you. Please kiss me and put all love into it.”
The Colonel held her close, with her head thrown back and kissed her until there was nothing left of the kiss but desperation.