A Farewell to Arms (Unabridged). Ernest Hemingway

Чтение книги онлайн.

      CHAPTER 3

       Table of Contents

      When I came back to the front we still lived in that town. There were many more guns in the country around and the spring had come. The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. In the town there were more guns, there were some new hospitals, you met British men and sometimes women, on the street, and a few more houses had been hit by shell fire. It was warm and like the spring and I walked down the alleyway of trees, warmed from the sun on the wall, and found we still lived in the same house and that it all looked the same as when I had left it. The door was open, there was a soldier sitting on a bench outside in the sun, an ambulance was waiting by the side door and inside the door, as I went in, there was the smell of marble floors and hospital. It was all as I had left it except that now it was spring. I looked in the door of the big room and saw the major sitting at his desk, the window open and the sunlight coming into the room. He did not see me and I did not know whether to go in and report or go upstairs first and clean up. I decided to go on upstairs.

      The room I shared with the lieutenant Rinaldi looked out on the courtyard. The window was open, my bed was made up with blankets and my things hung on the wall, the gas mask in an oblong tin can, the steel helmet on the same peg. At the foot of the bed was my flat trunk, and my winter boots, the leather shiny with oil, were on the trunk. My Austrian sniper’s rifle with its blued octagon barrel and the lovely dark walnut, cheek-fitted, schutzen stock, hung over the two beds. The telescope that fitted it was, I remembered, locked in the trunk. The lieutenant, Rinaldi, lay asleep on the other bed. He woke when he heard me in the room and sat up.

      “Ciaou!” he said. “What kind of time did you have?”

      “Magnificent.”

      We shook hands and he put his arm around my neck and kissed me.

      “Oughf,” I said.

      “You’re dirty,” he said. “You ought to wash. Where did you go and what did you do? Tell me everything at once.”

      “I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina —— ”

      “You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?”

      “Yes.”

      “Where?”

      “Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli —— ”

      “That’s enough. Tell me really what was the best.”

      “In Milano.”

      “That was because it was first. Where did you meet her? In the Cova? Where did you go? How did you feel? Tell me everything at once. Did you stay all night?”

      “Yes.”

      “That’s nothing. Here now we have beautiful girls. New girls never been to the front before.”

      “Wonderful.”

      “You don’t believe me? We will go now this afternoon and see. And in the town we have beautiful English girls. I am now in love with Miss Barkley. I will take you to call. I will probably marry Miss Barkley.”

      “I have to get washed and report. Doesn’t anybody work now?”

      “Since you are gone we have nothing but frostbites, chilblains, jaundice, gonorrhea, self-inflicted wounds, pneumonia and hard and soft chancres. Every week some one gets wounded by rock fragments. There are a few real wounded. Next week the war starts again. Perhaps it starts again. They say so. Do you think I would do right to marry Miss Barkley — after the war of course?”