Short Fiction by Ernest Hemingway (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

Peduzzi stopped in front of a store with the window full of bottles and brought his empty grappa bottle from an inside pocket of his old military coat. “A little to drink, some marsala for the Signora, something, something to drink.” He gestured with the bottle. It was a wonderful day. “Marsala, you like marsala, Signorina? A little marsala?”

The wife stood sullenly. “You’ll have to play up to this,” she said. “I can’t understand a word he says. He’s drunk, isn’t he?”

The young gentleman appeared not to hear Peduzzi. He was thinking, what in hell makes him say marsala? That’s what Max Beerbohm drinks.

“Geld,” Peduzzi said finally, taking hold of the young gentleman’s sleeve. “Lire.” He smiled, reluctant to press the subject but needing to bring the young gentleman into action.

The young gentleman took out his pocketbook and gave him a ten-lira note. Peduzzi went up the steps to the door of the Specialty of Domestic and Foreign Wines shop. It was locked.

“It is closed until two,” someone passing in the street said scornfully. Peduzzi came down the steps. He felt hurt. Never mind, he said, we can get it at the Concordia.

They walked down the road to the Concordia three abreast. On the porch of the Concordia, where the rusty bobsleds were stacked, the young gentleman said, “Was wollen sie?” Peduzzi handed him the ten-lira note folded over and over. “Nothing,” he said, “anything.” He was embarrassed. “Marsala, maybe. I don’t know. Marsala?”

The door of the Concordia shut on the young gentleman and the wife. “Three marsalas,” said the young gentleman to the girl behind the pastry counter. “Two, you mean?” she asked. “No,” he said, “one for a vecchio.” “Oh,” she said, “a vecchio,” and laughed, getting down the bottle. She poured out the three muddy looking drinks into three glasses. The wife was sitting at a table under the line of newspapers on sticks. The young gentleman put one of the marsalas in front of her. “You might as well drink it,” he said, “maybe it’ll make you feel better.” She sat and looked at the glass. The young gentleman went outside the door with a glass for Peduzzi but could not see him.

“I don’t know where he is,” he said, coming back into the pastry room carrying the glass.

“He wanted a quart of it,” said the wife.

“How much is a quarter litre?” the young gentleman asked the girl.

“Of the bianco? One lira.”

“No, of the marsala. Put these two in, too,” he said, giving her his own glass and the one poured for Peduzzi. She filled the quarter litre wine measure with a funnel. “A bottle to carry it,” said the young gentleman.

She went to hunt for a bottle. It all amused her.

“I’m sorry you feel so rotten, Tiny,” he said. “I’m sorry I talked the way I did at lunch. We were both getting at the same thing from different angles.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “None of it makes any difference.”

“Are you too cold?” he asked. “I wish you’d worn another sweater.”

“I’ve got on three sweaters.”

The girl came in with a very slim brown bottle and poured the marsala into it. The young gentleman paid five lire more. They went out the door. The girl was amused. Peduzzi was walking up and down at the other end out of the wind and holding the rods.

“Come on,” he said, “I will carry the rods. What difference does it make if anybody sees them? No one will trouble us. No one will make any trouble for me in Cortina. I know them at the municipio. I have been a soldier. Everybody in this town likes me. I sell frogs. What if it is forbidden to fish? Not a thing. Nothing. No trouble. Big trout, I tell you. Lots of them.”

They were walking down the hill toward the river. The town was in back of them. The sun had gone under and it was sprinkling rain. “There,” said Peduzzi, pointing to a girl in the doorway of a house they passed. “My daughter.”

“His doctor,” the wife said, “has he got to show us his doctor?”

“He said his daughter,” said the young gentleman.

The girl went into the house as Peduzzi pointed.

They walked down the hill across the fields and then turned to follow the river bank. Peduzzi talked rapidly with much winking and knowingness. As they walked three abreast the wife caught his breath across the wind. Once he nudged her in the ribs. Part of the time he talked in d’Ampezzo dialect and sometimes in Tyroler German dialect. He could not make out which the young gentleman and his wife understood the best so he was being bilingual. But as the young gentleman said, Ja, Ja, Peduzzi decided to talk altogether in Tyroler. The young gentleman and the wife understood nothing.

“Everybody in the town saw us going through with these rods. We’re probably being followed by the game police now. I wish we weren’t in on this damn thing. This damned old fool is so drunk, too.”

“Of course you haven’t got the guts to just go back,” said the wife. “Of course you have to go on.”

“Why don’t you go back? Go on back, Tiny.”

“I’m going to stay with you. If you go to jail we might as well both go.”

They turned sharp down the bank and Peduzzi stood, his coat blowing in the wind, gesturing at the river. It was brown and muddy. Off on the right there was a dump heap.

“Say it to me in Italian,” said the young gentleman.

“Un’ mezz’ ora. Piu d’ un’ mezz’ ora.”

“He says it’s at least a half hour more. Go on back, Tiny. You’re cold in this wind anyway. It’s a rotten day and we aren’t going to have any fun, anyway.”

“All right,” she said, and climbed up the grassy bank.

Peduzzi was down at the river and did not