“This is good for you, Daughter. It is good for all the ills that all of us have, and for all sadness and indecision.”
“I have none of those,” she said, speaking grammatically as her governess had taught her. “I am just a woman, or a girl, or whatever that is, doing whatever it is she should not do. Let’s do it again, please, now I am in the lee.”
“Where is the island now and in what river?”
“You are making the discovery. I am only the unknown country.”
“Not too unknown,” the Colonel said.
“Please don’t be rude,” the girl said. “And please attack gently and with the same attack as before.”
“It’s no attack,” the Colonel said. “It’s something else.”
“Whatever it is, whatever it is, while I’m still in the lee.”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “Yes, now if you want, or will accept from kindness.”
“Please, yes.”
She talks like a gentle cat, though the poor cats cannot speak, the Colonel thought. But then he stopped thinking and he did not think for a long time.
The gondola now was in one of the secondary canals. When it had turned from the Grand Canal, the wind had swung it so the gondoliere had to shift all his weight as ballast, and the Colonel and the girl had shifted too, under the blanket, with the wind getting under the edge of the blanket; wildly.
They had not spoken for a long time and the Colonel had noted that the gondola had only inches free in passing under the last bridge.
“How are you, Daughter?”
“I’m quite lovely.”
“Do you love me?”
“Please don’t ask such silly things.”
“The tide is very high and we only just made that last bridge.”
“I think I know where we are going. I was born here.”
“I’ve made mistakes in my home town,” the Colonel said. “Being born there isn’t everything.”
“It is very much,” the girl said. “You know that. Please hold me very tightly so we can be a part of each other for a little while.”
“We can try,” the Colonel said.
“Couldn’t I be you?”
“That’s awfully complicated. We could try of course.”
“I’m you now,” she said. “And I just took the city of Paris.”
“Jesus, Daughter,” he said. “You’ve got an awful lot of problems on your hands. The next thing, they will parade the twenty-eighth division through.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“Were they not good?”
“Sure. They had fine commanders, too. But they were National Guard and hard luck. What you call a T.S. division. Get your T.S. slip from the Chaplain.”
“I understand none of those things.”
“They aren’t worth explaining,” the Colonel said.
“Will you tell me some true things about Paris? I love it so much and when I think of you taking it, then, it is as though I were riding in this gondola with Maréchal Ney.”
“A no good job,” the Colonel said. “Anyway, not after he fought all those rear-guard actions coming back from that big Russian town. He used to fight ten, twelve, fifteen times a day. Maybe more. Afterwards, he couldn’t recognize people. Please don’t get in any gondolas with him.”
“He was always one of my great heroes.”
“Yeah. Mine too. Until Quatre Bras. Maybe it wasn’t Quatre Bras. I’m getting rusty. Give it the generic title of Waterloo.”
“Was he bad there?”
“Awful,” the Colonel told her. “Forget it. Too many rear-guard actions coming back from Moskova.”
“But they called him the bravest of the brave.”
“You can’t eat on that. You have to be that, always, and then be the smartest of the smart. Then you need a lot of stuff coming up.”
“Tell me about Paris, please. We should not make more love, I know.”
“I don’t know it. Who says it?”
“I say it because I love you.”
“All right. You said it and you love me. So we act on that. The hell with it.”
“Do you think we could once more if it would not hurt you?”
“Hurt me?” the Colonel said. “When the hell was I ever hurt?”
CHAPTER XIV
“PLEASE don’t be bad,” she said, pulling the blanket over them both. “Please drink a glass of this with me. You know you’ve been hurt.”