For Whom the Bell Tolls (8 page)

“You know him well?”

“Yes. For a long time. I have much confidence in him.”

“And what he says?”

“Yes, man. This Pablo is bad now, as you could see.”

“And the best thing to do?”

“One shall guard it at all times.”

“Who?”

“You. Me. The woman and Agustín. Since he sees the danger.”

“Did you think things were as bad as they are here?”

“No,” Anselmo said. “They have gone bad very fast. But it was necessary to come here. This is the country of Pablo and of El Sordo. In their country we must deal with them unless it is something that can be done alone.”

“And El Sordo?”

“Good,” Anselmo said. “As good as the other is bad.”

“You believe now that he is truly bad?”

“All afternoon I have thought of it and since we have heard what we have heard, I think now, yes. Truly.”

“It would not be better to leave, speaking of another bridge, and obtain men from other bands?”

“No,” Anselmo said. “This is his country. You could not move that he would not know it. But one must move with much precautions.”

They came down to the mouth of the cave, where a light shone out from the edge of a blanket that hung over the opening. The two packs were at the foot of the tree covered with a canvas and Robert Jordan knelt down and felt the canvas wet and stiff over them. In the dark he felt under the canvas in the outside pocket of one of the packs and took out a leather-covered flask and slipped it in his pocket. Unlocking the long barred padlocks that passed through the grommet that closed the opening of the mouth of the packs, and untying the drawstring at the top of each pack, he felt inside them and verified their contents with his hands. Deep in one pack he felt the bundled blocks in the sacks, the sacks wrapped in the sleeping robe, and tying the strings of that and pushing the lock shut again, he put his hands into the other and felt the sharp wood outline of the box of the old exploder, the cigar box with the caps, each little cylinder wrapped round and round with its two wires (the lot of them packed as carefully as he had packed his collection of wild bird eggs when he was a boy), the stock of the submachine gun, disconnected from the barrel and wrapped in his leather jacket, the two pans and five clips in one of the inner pockets of the big pack-sack and the small coils of copper wire and the big coil of light insulated wire in the other. In the pocket with the wire he felt his pliers and the two wooden awls for making holes in the end of the blocks and then,
from the last inside pocket, he took a big box of the Russian cigarettes of the lot he had from Golz's headquarters and tying the mouth of the pack shut, he pushed the lock in, buckled the flaps down and again covered both packs with the canvas. Anselmo had gone on into the cave.

Robert Jordan stood up to follow him, then reconsidered and, lifting the canvas off the two packs, picked them up, one in each hand, and started with them, just able to carry them, for the mouth of the cave. He laid one pack down and lifted the blanket aside, then with his head stooped and with a pack in each hand, carrying by the leather shoulder straps, he went into the cave.

It was warm and smoky in the cave. There was a table along one wall with a tallow candle stuck in a bottle on it and at the table were seated Pablo, three men he did not know, and the gypsy, Rafael. The candle made shadows on the wall behind the men and Anselmo stood where he had come in to the right of the table. The wife of Pablo was standing over the charcoal fire on the open fire hearth in the corner of the cave. The girl knelt by her stirring in an iron pot. She lifted the wooden spoon out and looked at Robert Jordan as he stood there in the doorway and he saw, in the glow from the fire the woman was blowing with a bellows, the girl's face, her arm and the drops running down from the spoon and dropping into the iron pot.

“What do you carry?” Pablo said.

“My things,” Robert Jordan said and set the two packs down a little way apart where the cave opened out on the side away from the table.

“Are they not well outside?” Pablo asked.

“Some one might trip over them in the dark,” Robert Jordan said and walked over to the table and laid the box of cigarettes on it.

“I do not like to have dynamite here in the cave,” Pablo said.

“It is far from the fire,” Robert Jordan said. “Take some cigarettes.” He ran his thumbnail along the side of the paper box with the big colored figure of a warship on the cover and pushed the box toward Pablo.

Anselmo brought him a rawhide-covered stool and he sat down at the table. Pablo looked at him as though he were going to speak again, then reached for the cigarettes.

Robert Jordan pushed them toward the others. He was not looking at them yet. But he noted one man took cigarettes and two did not. All of his concentration was on Pablo.

“How goes it, gypsy?” he said to Rafael.

“Good,” the gypsy said. Robert Jordan could tell they had been talking about him when he came in. Even the gypsy was not at ease.

“She is going to let you eat again?” Robert Jordan asked the gypsy.

“Yes. Why not?” the gypsy said. It was a long way from the friendly joking they had together in the afternoon.

The woman of Pablo said nothing and went on blowing up the coals of the fire.

“One called Agustín says he dies of boredom above,” Robert Jordan said.

“That doesn't kill,” Pablo said. “Let him die a little.”

“Is there wine?” Robert Jordan asked the table at large, leaning forward, his hands on the table.

“There is little left,” Pablo said sullenly. Robert Jordan decided he had better look at the other three and try to see where he stood.

“In that case, let me have a cup of water. Thou,” he called to the girl. “Bring me a cup of water.”

The girl looked at the woman, who said nothing, and gave no sign of having heard, then she went to a kettle containing water and dipped a cup full. She brought it to the table and put it down before him. Robert Jordan smiled at her. At the same time he sucked in on his stomach muscles and swung a little to the left on his stool so that his pistol slipped around on his belt closer to where he wanted it. He reached his hand down toward his hip pocket and Pablo watched him. He knew they all were watching him, too, but he watched only Pablo. His hand came up from the hip pocket with the leather-covered flask and he unscrewed the top and then, lifting the cup, drank half the water and poured very slowly from the flask into the cup.

“It is too strong for thee or I would give thee some,” he said to the girl and smiled at her again. “There is little left or I would offer some to thee,” he said to Pablo.

“I do not like anis,” Pablo said.

The acrid smell had carried across the table and he had picked out the one familiar component.

“Good,” said Robert Jordan. “Because there is very little left.”

“What drink is that?” the gypsy asked.

“A medicine,” Robert Jordan said. “Do you want to taste it?”

“What is it for?”

“For everything,” Robert Jordan said. “It cures everything. If you have anything wrong this will cure it.”

“Let me taste it,” the gypsy said.

Robert Jordan pushed the cup toward him. It was a milky yellow now with the water and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. There was very little of it left and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot's old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

The gypsy made a face and handed the cup back. “It smells of anis but it is bitter as gall,” he said. “It is better to be sick than have that medicine.”

“That's the wormwood,” Robert Jordan told him. “In this, the real absinthe, there is wormwood. It's supposed to rot your brain out but I don't believe it. It only changes the ideas. You should pour water into it very slowly, a few drops at a time. But I poured it into the water.”

“What are you saying?” Pablo said angrily, feeling the mockery.

“Explaining the medicine,” Robert Jordan told him and grinned. “I bought it in Madrid. It was the last bottle and it's lasted me three weeks.” He took a big swallow of it and felt it coasting over his tongue in delicate anæsthesia. He looked at Pablo and grinned again.

“How's business?” he asked.

Pablo did not answer and Robert Jordan looked carefully at the other three men at the table. One had a large flat face, flat and brown as a Serrano ham with a nose flattened and broken, and the long thin Russian cigarette, projecting at an angle, made the face look even flatter. This man had short gray hair and a gray stubble of beard and wore the usual black smock buttoned at the neck. He looked down at the table when Robert Jordan looked at him but his eyes were steady and they did not blink. The other two were evidently brothers. They looked much alike and were both short, heavily built, dark haired, their hair growing low on their foreheads, dark-eyed and brown. One had a scar across his forehead above his left eye and as he looked at them, they looked back at him steadily. One looked to be about twenty-six or -eight, the other perhaps two years older.

“What are you looking at?” one brother, the one with the scar, asked.

“Thee,” Robert Jordan said.

“Do you see anything rare?”

“No,” said Robert Jordan. “Have a cigarette?”

“Why not?” the brother said. He had not taken any before. “These are like the other had. He of the train.”

“Were you at the train?”

“We were all at the train,” the brother said quietly. “All except the old man.”

“That is what we should do now,” Pablo said. “Another train.”

“We can do that,” Robert Jordan said. “After the bridge.”

He could see that the wife of Pablo had turned now from the fire and was listening. When he said the word “bridge” every one was quiet.

“After the bridge,” he said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe. I might as well bring it on, he thought. It's coming anyway.

“I do not go for the bridge,” Pablo said, looking down at the table. “Neither me nor my people.”

Robert Jordan said nothing. He looked at Anselmo and raised the cup. “Then we shall do it alone, old one,” he said and smiled.

“Without this coward,” Anselmo said.

“What did you say?” Pablo spoke to the old man.

“Nothing for thee. I did not speak to thee,” Anselmo told him.

Robert Jordan now looked past the table to where the wife of Pablo was standing by the fire. She had said nothing yet, nor given any sign. But now she said something he could not hear to the girl and the girl rose from the cooking fire, slipped along the wall, opened the blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and went out. I think it is going to come now, Robert Jordan thought. I believe this is it. I did not want it to be this way but this seems to be the way it is.

“Then we will do the bridge without thy aid,” Robert Jordan said to Pablo.

“No,” Pablo said, and Robert Jordan watched his face sweat. “Thou wilt blow no bridge here.”

“No?”

“Thou wilt blow no bridge,” Pablo said heavily.

“And thou?” Robert Jordan spoke to the wife of Pablo who was standing, still and huge, by the fire. She turned toward them and said, “I am for the bridge.” Her face was lit by the fire and it was flushed and it shone warm and dark and handsome now in the firelight as it was meant to be.

“What do you say?” Pablo said to her and Robert Jordan saw the betrayed look on his face and the sweat on his forehead as he turned his head.

“I am for the bridge and against thee,” the wife of Pablo said. “Nothing more.”

“I am also for the bridge,” the man with the flat face and the broken nose said, crushing the end of the cigarette on the table.

“To me the bridge means nothing,” one of the brothers said. “I am for the
mujer
of Pablo.”

“Equally,” said the other brother.

“Equally,” the gypsy said.

Robert Jordan watched Pablo and as he watched, letting his right hand hang lower and lower, ready if it should be necessary, half hoping it would be (feeling perhaps that were the simplest and easiest yet not wishing to spoil what had gone so well, knowing how quickly all of a family, all of a clan, all of a band, can turn against a stranger in a quarrel, yet thinking what could be done with the hand
were the simplest and best and surgically the most sound now that this had happened), saw also the wife of Pablo standing there and watched her blush proudly and soundly and healthily as the allegiances were given.

“I am for the Republic,” the woman of Pablo said happily. “And the Republic is the bridge. Afterwards we will have time for other projects.”

“And thou,” Pablo said bitterly. “With your head of a seed bull and your heart of a whore. Thou thinkest there will be an afterwards from this bridge? Thou hast an idea of that which will pass?”

“That which must pass,” the woman of Pablo said. “That which must pass, will pass.”

“And it means nothing to thee to be hunted then like a beast after this thing from which we derive no profit? Nor to die in it?”

“Nothing,” the woman of Pablo said. “And do not try to frighten me, coward.”

“Coward,” Pablo said bitterly. “You treat a man as coward because he has a tactical sense. Because he can see the results of an idiocy in advance. It is not cowardly to know what is foolish.”