“Couldn’t you just be good to me and let me go?” the girl asked.
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
Two people came in the door and went up to the bar.
“Yes, sir,” the barman took the orders.
“You can’t forgive me? When you know about it?” the girl asked.
“No.”
“You don’t think things we’ve had and done should make any difference in understanding?”
“ ‘Vice is a monster of such fearful mien,’ ” the young man said bitterly, “that to be something or other needs but to be seen. Then we something, something, then embrace.” He could not remember the words. “I can’t quote,” he said.
“Let’s not say vice,” she said. “That’s not very polite.”
“Perversion,” he said.
“James,” one of the clients addressed the barman, “you’re looking very well.”
“You’re looking very well yourself,” the barman said.
“Old James,” the other client said. “You’re fatter, James.”
“It’s terrible,” the barman said, “the way I put it on.”
“Don’t neglect to insert the brandy, James,” the first client said.
“No, sir,” said the barman. “Trust me.”
The two at the bar looked over at the two at the table, then looked back at the barman again. Towards the barman was the comfortable direction.
“I’d like it better if you didn’t use words like that,” the girl said. “There’s no necessity to use a word like that.”
“What do you want me to call it?”
“You don’t have to call it. You don’t have to put any name to it.”
“That’s the name for it.”
“No,” she said. “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough.”
“You don’t have to say that again.”
“Because that explains it to you.”
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
“You mean all wrong. I know. It’s all wrong. But I’ll come back. I told you I’d come back. I’ll come back right away.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I’ll come back.”
“No, you won’t. Not to me.”
“You’ll see.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s the hell of it. You probably will.”
“Of course I will.”
“Go on, then.”
“Really?” She could not believe him, but her voice was happy.
“Go on,” his voice sounded strange to him. He was looking at her, at the way her mouth went and the curve of her cheek bones, at her eyes and at the way her hair grew on her forehead and at the edge of her ear and at her neck.
“Not really. Oh, you’re too sweet,” she said. “You’re too good to me.”
“And when you come back tell me all about it.” His voice sounded very strange. He did not recognize it. She looked at him quickly. He was settled into something.
“You want me to go?” she asked seriously.
“Yes,” he said seriously. “Right away.” His voice was not the same, and his mouth was very dry. “Now,” he said.
She stood up and went out quickly. She did not look back at him. He watched her go. He was not the same looking man as he had been before he had told her to go. He got up from the table, picked up the two checks and went over to the bar with them.
“I’m a different man, James,” he said to the barman. “You see in me quite a different man.”
“Yes, sir?” said James.
“Vice,” said the brown young man, “is a very strange thing, James.” He looked out the door. He saw her going down the street. As he looked in the glass, he saw he was really quite a different looking man. The other two at the bar moved down to make room for him.
“You’re right there, sir,” James said.
The other two moved down a little more, so that he would be quite comfortable. The young man saw himself in the mirror behind the bar. “I said I was a different man, James,” he said. Looking into the mirror he saw that this was quite true.
“You look very well, sir,” James said. “You must have had a very good summer.”
A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE
The attack had gone across the field, been held up by machine-gun fire from the sunken road and from the group of farm houses, encountered no resistance in the town, and reached the bank of the river. Coming along the road on a bicycle, getting off to push the machine when the surface of the road became too broken, Nicholas Adams saw what had happened by the position of the dead.
They lay alone or in clumps in the high grass of the field and along the road, their pockets out, and over them were flies and around each body or group of bodies were the scattered papers.
In the grass and the grain, beside the road, and in some places scattered over the road, there was much material: a field kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the calf-skin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, sometimes one butt up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt, they had dug quite a little at the last; stick bombs, helmets, rifles, intrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers.
There were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit standing in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college annual; now they were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head. There were many of these inciting cards which had evidently been issued just before the offensive. Now they were scattered with the smutty postcards, photographic; the small photographs of village girls by village photographers, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters. There was always much paper about the dead and the débris of this attack was no exception.
These were new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets. Our own dead, or what he thought of, still, as our own dead, were surprisingly few, Nick noticed. Their coats had been opened too and their pockets were out, and they showed, by their positions, the manner and the skill of the attack. The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.
The town had evidently been defended, at the last, from the line of the sunken road and there had been few or no Austrians to fall back into it. There were only three bodies in the street and they looked to have been killed running. The houses of the town were broken by the shelling and the street had much rubble of plaster and mortar and there were broken beams, broken tiles, and many holes, some of them yellow-edged from the mustard gas. There were many pieces of shell, and shrapnel balls were scattered in the rubble. There was no one in the town at all.
Nick Adams had seen no one since he had left Fornaci, although, riding along the road through the over-foliaged country, he had seen guns hidden under screens of mulberry leaves to the left of the road, noticing them by the heatwaves in the air above the leaves where the sun hit the metal. Now he went on through the town, surprised to find it deserted, and came out on the low road beneath the bank of the river. Leaving the town there was a bare open space where the road slanted down and he could see the placid reach of the river and the low curve of the opposite bank and the whitened, sun-baked mud where the Austrians had dug. It was all very lush and over-green since he had seen it last and becoming historical had made no change in this, the lower river.
The battalion was along the bank to the left. There was a series of holes in the top of the bank with a few men in them. Nick noticed where the machine guns were posted and the signal rockets in their racks. The men in the holes in the side of the bank were sleeping. No one challenged. He went on and as he came around a turn in the mud bank a young second lieutenant with a stubble of beard and red-rimmed, very blood-shot eyes pointed a pistol at him.
“Who are you?”
Nick told him.
“How do I know this?”
Nick showed him the tessera with photograph and identification and the seal of the third army. He took hold of it.
“I will keep this.”
“You will not,” Nick said. “Give me back the card and put your gun away. There. In the holster.”
“How am I to know who you are?”
“The tessera tells you.”
“And if the tessera is false? Give me that card.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Nick said cheerfully. “Take me to your company commander.”
“I should send you to battalion headquarters.”
“All right,” said Nick. “Listen, do you know the Captain Paravicini? The tall one with the small mustache who was an architect and speaks English?”
“You know him?”
“A little.”
“What company does he command?”
“The second.”
“He is commanding the battalion.”
“Good,” said Nick. He was relieved to know that Para was all right. “Let us go to the battalion.”
As Nick had left the edge of the town
