Ernest Hemingway

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
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CHAPTER XVIII

THE hall porter pushed the Gazzetino under the door, and the Colonel had it, noiselessly, almost as soon as it had passed through the slit.

He very nearly took it from the hall porter’s hand. He did not like the hall porter since he had found him, one day, going through his bag, when he, the Colonel, had re-entered the room after having left it, presumably for some time. He had to come back to the room to get his bottle of the medicine, which he had forgotten, and the hall porter was well through his bag.

“I guess you don’t say stick them up in this hotel,” the Colonel had said. “But you’re no credit to your town.”

There was silence produced, and re-produced, by the striped waist-coated man with the Fascist face, and the Colonel said, “Go on, boy, look through the rest of it. I don’t carry any military secrets with my toilet articles.” Since then, there was scant friendship between them, and the Colonel enjoyed trying to take the morning paper from the striped waist-coated man’s hand; noise­lessly, and when he heard, or saw it first make a move under the door.

“OK, you won today, jerk,” he said in the best Vene­tian dialect he could summon at that hour. “Go hang yourself.”

But they don’t hang themselves, he thought. They just have to go on putting papers under other people’s doors that do not even hate them. It must be quite a difficult trade being an ex-Fascist. Maybe he is not an ex-Fascist too. How do you know.

I can’t hate Fascists, he thought. Nor Krauts either, since unfortunately, I am a soldier.

“Listen, Portrait,” he said. “Do I have to hate the Krauts because we kill them? Do I have to hate them as soldiers and as human beings? It seems too easy a solu­tion to me.”

Well, portrait. Forget it. Forget it. You’re not old enough to know about it. You are two years younger than the girl that you portray, and she is younger and older than hell; which is quite an old place.

“Listen, portrait,” he said, and saying it, knew that now as long as he lived, (...)

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