A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway [98]
"I am too."
"It is true, isn't it, darling? I'm not just driving down to the stazione in Milan to see you off."
"I hope not."
"Don't say that. It frightens me. Maybe that's where we're going."
"I'm so groggy I don't know," I said.
"Let me see your hands."
I put them out. They were both blistered raw.
"There's no hole in my side," I said.
"Don't be sacrilegious."
I felt very tired and vague in the head. The exhilaration was all gone. The carriage was going along the Street.
"Poor hands," Catherine said.
"Don't touch them," I said. "By God I don't know where we are. Where are we going, driver?" The driver stopped his horse.
"To the Hotel Metropole. Don't you want to go there?"
"Yes," I said. "It's all right, Cat."
"It's all right, darling. Don't be upset. We'll get a good sleep and you won't feel groggy to-morrow."
"I get pretty groggy," I said. "It's like a comic opera to-day. Maybe I'm hungry."
"You're just tired, darling. You'll be fine." The carriage pulled up before the hotel. Some one came out to take our bags.
"I feel all right," I said. We were down on the pavement going into the hotel.
"I know you'll be all right. You're just tired. You've been up a long time."
"Anyhow we're here."
"Yes, we're really here."
We followed the boy with the bags into the hotel.
BOOK FIVE
38
That fall the snow came very late. We lived in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountain and at night there was frost so that there was thin ice over the water in the two pitchers on the dresser in the morning. Mrs. Guttingen came into the room early in the morning to shut the windows and started a fire in the tall porcelain stove. The pine wood crackled and sparked and then the fire roared in the stove and the second time Mrs. Guttingen came into the room she brought big chunks of wood for the fire and a pitcher of hot water. When the room was warm she brought in breakfast. Sitting up in bed eating breakfast we could see the lake and the mountains across the lake on the French side. There was snow on the tops of the mountains and the lake was a gray steel-blue.
Outside, in front of the chalet a road went up the mountain. The wheel ruts and ridges were iron hard with the frost, and the road climbed steadily through the forest and up and around the mountain to where there were meadows, and barns and cabins in the meadows at the edge of the woods looking across the valley. The valley was deep and there was a stream at the bottom that flowed down into the lake and when the wind blew across the valley you could hear the stream in the rocks.
Sometimes we went off the road and on a path through the pine forest. The floor of the forest was soft to walk on; the frost did not harden it as it did the road. But we did not mind the hardness of the road because we had nails in the soles and heels of our boots and the heel nails bit on the frozen ruts and with nailed boots it was good walking on the road and invigorating. But it was lovely walking in the woods.
In front of the house where we lived the mountain went down steeply to the little plain along the lake and we sat on the porch of the house in the sun and saw the winding of the road down the mountain-side and the terraced vineyards on the side of the lower mountain, the vines all dead now for the winter and the fields divided by stone walls, and below the vineyards the houses of the town on the narrow plain along the lake shore. There was an island with two trees on the lake and the trees looked like the double sails of a fishing-boat. The mountains were sharp and steep on the other side of the lake and down at the end of the lake was the plain of the Rhone Valley flat between the two ranges of mountains; and up the valley where the mountains cut it off was the Dent du Midi. It was a high snowy mountain and it dominated the valley but it was so far away that it did not make a shadow.
When the sun was bright we ate lunch on the porch but the rest of the time we ate upstairs in a small room with plain wooden walls and