CHAPTER XXXII
“YOU slept quite well for a time,” the girl told him, lovingly and gently. “Is there anything you would like me to do?”
“Nothing,” the Colonel said. “Thank you.”
Then he turned bad and he said, “Daughter I could sleep good straight up and down in the electric chair with my pants slit and my hair clipped. I sleep as, and when, I need it.”
“I can never be like that,” the girl said, sleepily. “I sleep when I am sleepy.”
“You’re lovely,” the Colonel told her. “And you sleep better than anyone ever slept.”
“I am not proud of it,” the girl said, very sleepily. “It is just something that I do.”
“Do it, please.”
“No. Tell me very low and soft and put your bad hand in mine.”
“The hell with my bad hand,” the Colonel said. “Since when was it so bad.”
“It’s bad,” the girl said. “Badder, or worse, than you will ever know. Please tell me about combat without being too brutal.”
“An easy assignment,” the Colonel said. “I’ll skip the times. The weather is cloudy and the place is 986342. What’s the situation? We are smoking the enemy with artillery and mortar. S-3 advises that S-6 wants Red to button up by 1700. S-6 wants you to button up and use plenty of artillery. White reports that they are in fair shape. S-6 informs that A company will swing around and tie in with B.
“B Company was stopped first by enemy action and stayed there of their own accord. S-6 isn’t doing so good. This is unofficial. He wants more artillery but there isn’t any more artillery.
“You wanted combat for what? I don’t know really why. Or really know why. Who wants true combat? But here it is, Daughter, on the telephone and later I will put in the sounds and smells and anecdotes about who was killed when and where if you want them.”
“I only want what you will tell me.”
“I’ll tell you how it was,” the Colonel said, “and General Walter Bedell Smith doesn’t know how it was yet. Though, probably, I am wrong, as I have been so many times.”
“I’m glad we don’t have to know him or the nylon-smooth man,” the girl said.
“We won’t have to know them this side of hell,” the Colonel assured her. “And I will have a detail guarding the gates of hell so that no such characters enter.”
“You sound like Dante,” she said sleepily.
“I am Mister Dante,” he said. “For the moment.”
And for a while he was and he drew all the circles. They were as unjust as Dante’s but he drew them.
CHAPTER XXXIII
“I WILL skip the detailed part since you are, justifiably, and should be, sleepy,” the Colonel said. He watched, again, the strange play of the light on the ceiling. Then he looked at the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl that he had ever seen, ever.
He had seen them come and go, and they go faster, when they go, than any other thing that flies. They can go faster from fair beauty to the knocker’s shop than any other animal, he thought. But I believe that this one could hold the pace and stay the course. The dark ones last the best, he thought, and look at the bony structure in that face. This one has a fine blood line too, and she can go forever. Most of our own lovely beauties come from soda counters, and they do not know their grandfather’s last name, unless, maybe, it was Schultz. Or Schlitz, he thought.
This is the wrong attitude to take, he said to himself; since he did not wish to express any of these sentiments to the girl, who would not like them anyway, and was soundly sleepy now the way a cat is when it sleeps within itself.
“Sleep well, my dearest lovely, and I will just tell it for nothing.”
The girl was asleep, still holding his bad hand, that he despised, and he could feel her breathe, as the young breathe when they are easily asleep.
The Colonel told her all about it; but he did not utter it.