For Whom the Bell Tolls (53 page)

“That is a woman that is not to joke about. Not even by a cynic like you,” the puffy-eyed man said. “If you could have been here to hear her and to see her face.”

“That great voice,” Karkov said. “That great face. Write it,” he said. “Don't tell it to me. Don't waste whole paragraphs on me. Go and write it now.”

“Not just now.”

“I think you'd better,” Karkov said and looked at him, and then looked away. The puffy-eyed man stood there a couple of minutes more holding his glass of vodka, his eyes, puffy as they were, absorbed in the beauty of what he had seen and heard and then he left the room to write it.

Karkov went over to another man of about forty-eight, who was short, chunky, jovial-looking with pale blue eyes, thinning blond hair and a gay mouth under a bristly yellow moustache. This man was in uniform. He was a divisional commander and he was a Hungarian.

“Were you here when the Dolores was here?” Karkov asked the man.

“Yes.”

“What was the stuff?”

“Something about the fascists fighting among themselves. Beautiful if true.”

“You hear much talk of tomorrow.”

“Scandalous. All the journalists should be shot as well as most of the people in this room and certainly the intriguing German unmentionable of a Richard. Whoever gave that Sunday
függler
command of a brigade should be shot. Perhaps you and me should be shot too. It is possible,” the General laughed. “Don't suggest it though.”

“That is a thing I never like to talk about,” Karkov said. “That American who comes here sometimes is over there. You know the one, Jordan, who is with the
partizan
group. He is there where this business they spoke of is supposed to happen.”

“Well, he should have a report through on it tonight then,” the General said. “They don't like me down there or I'd go down and find out for you. He works with Golz on this, doesn't he? You'll see Golz tomorrow.”

“Early tomorrow.”

“Keep out of his way until it's going well,” the General said. “He hates you bastards as much as I do. Though he has a much better temper.”

“But about this——”

“It was probably the fascists having manœuvres,” the General grinned. “Well, we'll see if Golz can manœuvre them a little. Let Golz try his hand at it. We manœuvred them at Guadalajara.”

“I hear you are travelling too,” Karkov said, showing his bad teeth as he smiled. The General was suddenly angry.

“And me too. Now is the mouth on me. And on all of us always. This filthy sewing circle of gossip. One man who could keep his mouth shut could save the country if he believed he could.”

“Your friend Prieto can keep his mouth shut.”

“But he doesn't believe he can win. How can you win without belief in the people?”

“You decide that,” Karkov said. “I am going to get a little sleep.”

He left the smoky, gossip-filled room and went into the back bedroom and sat down on the bed and pulled his boots off. He could still hear them talking so he shut the door and opened the window. He did not bother to undress because at two o'clock he would be starting for the drive by Colmenar, Cerceda, and Navacerrada up to the front where Golz would be attacking in the morning.

It was two o'clock in the morning when Pilar waked him. As her hand touched him he thought, at first, it was Maria and he rolled toward her and said, “Rabbit.” Then the woman's big hand shook his shoulder and he was suddenly, completely and absolutely awake and his hand was around the butt of the pistol that lay alongside of his bare right leg and all of him was as cocked as the pistol with its safety catch slipped off.

In the dark he saw it was Pilar and he looked at the dial of his wrist watch with the two hands shining in the short angle close to the top and seeing it was only two, he said, “What passes with thee, woman?”

“Pablo is gone,” the big woman said to him.

Robert Jordan put on his trousers and shoes. Maria had not waked.

“When?” he asked.

“It must be an hour.”

“And?”

“He has taken something of thine,” the woman said miserably.

“So. What?”

“I do not know,” she told him. “Come and see.”

In the dark they walked over to the entrance of the cave, ducked under the blanket and went in. Robert Jordan followed her in the
dead-ashes, bad-air and sleeping-men smell of the cave, shining his electric torch so that he would not step on any of those who were sleeping on the floor. Anselmo woke and said, “Is it time?”

“No,” Robert Jordan whispered. “Sleep, old one.”

The two sacks were at the head of Pilar's bed which was screened off with a hanging blanket from the rest of the cave. The bed smelt stale and sweat-dried and sickly-sweet the way an Indian's bed does as Robert Jordan knelt on it and shone the torch on the two sacks. There was a long slit from top to bottom in each one. Holding the torch in his left hand, Robert Jordan felt in the first sack with his right hand. This was the one that he carried his robe in and it should not be very full. It was not very full. There was some wire in it still but the square wooden box of the exploder was gone. So was the cigar box with the carefully wrapped and packed detonators. So was the screw-top tin with the fuse and the caps.

Robert Jordan felt in the other sack. It was still full of explosive. There might be one packet missing.

He stood up and turned to the woman. There is a hollow empty feeling that a man can have when he is waked too early in the morning that is almost like the feeling of disaster and he had this multiplied a thousand times.

“And this is what you call guarding one's materials,” he said.

“I slept with my head against them and one arm touching them,” Pilar told him.

“You slept well.”

“Listen,” the woman said. “He got up in the night and I said, ‘Where do you go, Pablo?' ‘To urinate, woman,' he told me and I slept again. When I woke again I did not know what time had passed but I thought, when he was not there, that he had gone down to look at the horses as was his custom. Then,” she finished miserably, “when he did not come I worried and when I worried I felt of the sacks to be sure all was well and there were the slit places and I came to thee.”

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said.

They were outside now and it was still so near the middle of the night that you could not feel the morning coming.

“Can he get out with the horses other ways than by the sentry?”

“Two ways.”

“Who's at the top?”

“Eladio.”

Robert Jordan said nothing more until they reached the meadow where the horses were staked out to feed. There were three horses feeding in the meadow. The big bay and the gray were gone.

“How long ago do you think it was he left you?”

“It must have been an hour.”

“Then that is that,” Robert Jordan said. “I go to get what is left of my sacks and go back to bed.”

“I will guard them.”

“
Qué va,
you will guard them. You've guarded them once already.”

“
Inglés,
” the woman said, “I feel in regard to this as you do. There is nothing I would not do to bring back thy property. You have no need to hurt me. We have both been betrayed by Pablo.”

As she said this Robert Jordan realized that he could not afford the luxury of being bitter, that he could not quarrel with this woman. He had to work with this woman on that day that was already two hours and more gone.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “It is nothing, Pilar,” he told her. “What is gone is of small importance. We shall improvise something that will do as well.”

“But what did he take?”

“Nothing, woman. Some luxuries that one permits oneself.”

“Was it part of thy mechanism for the exploding?”

“Yes. But there are other ways to do the exploding. Tell me, did Pablo not have caps and fuse? Surely they would have equipped him with those?”

“He has taken them,” she said miserably. “I looked at once for them. They are gone, too.”

They walked back through the woods to the entrance of the cave.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “We are better off with Pablo gone.”

“I go to see Eladio.”

“He will have gone another way.”

“I go anyway. I have betrayed thee with my lack of smartness.”

“Nay,” he said. “Get some sleep, woman. We must be under way at four.”

He went into the cave with her and brought out the two sacks, carrying them held together in both arms so that nothing could spill from the slits.

“Let me sew them up.”

“Before we start,” he said softly. “I take them not against you but so that I can sleep.”

“I must have them early to sew them.”

“You shall have them early,” he told her. “Get some sleep, woman.”

“Nay,” she said. “I have failed thee and I have failed the Republic.”

“Get thee some sleep, woman,” he told her gently. “Get thee some sleep.”

The fascists held the crests of the hills here. Then there was a valley that no one held except for a fascist post in a farmhouse with its outbuildings and its barn that they had fortified. Andrés, on his way to Golz with the message from Robert Jordan, made a wide circle around this post in the dark. He knew where there was a trip wire laid that fired a set-gun and he located it in the dark, stepped over it, and started along the small stream bordered with poplars whose leaves were moving with the night wind. A cock crowed at the farmhouse that was the fascist post and as he walked along the stream he looked back and saw, through the trunks of the poplars, a light showing at the lower edge of one of the windows of the farmhouse. The night was quiet and clear and Andrés left the stream and struck across the meadow.

There were four haycocks in the meadow that had stood there ever since the fighting in July of the year before. No one had ever carried the hay away and the four seasons that had passed had flattened the cocks and made the hay worthless.

Andrés thought what a waste it was as he stepped over a trip wire that ran between two of the haycocks. But the Republicans would have had to carry the hay up the steep Guadarrama slope that rose beyond the meadow and the fascists did not need it, I suppose, he thought.

They have all the hay they need and all the grain. They have
much, he thought. But we will give them a blow tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning we will give them something for Sordo. What barbarians they are! But in the morning there will be dust on the road.

He wanted to get this message-taking over and be back for the attack on the posts in the morning. Did he really want to get back though or did he only pretend he wanted to be back? He knew the reprieved feeling he had felt when the
Inglés
had told him he was to go with the message. He had faced the prospect of the morning calmly. It was what was to be done. He had voted for it and would do it. The wiping out of Sordo had impressed him deeply. But, after all, that was Sordo. That was not them. What they had to do they would do.

But when the
Inglés
had spoken to him of the message he had felt the way he used to feel when he was a boy and he had wakened in the morning of the festival of his village and heard it raining hard so that he knew that it would be too wet and that the bullbaiting in the square would be cancelled.

He loved the bullbaiting when he was a boy and he looked forward to it and to the moment when he would be in the square in the hot sun and the dust with the carts ranged all around to close the exits and to make a closed place into which the bull would come, sliding down out of his box, braking with all four feet, when they pulled the end-gate up. He looked forward with excitement, delight and sweating fear to the moment when, in the square, he would hear the clatter of the bull's horns knocking against the wood of his travelling box, and then the sight of him as he came, sliding, braking out into the square, his head up, his nostrils wide, his ears twitching, dust in the sheen of his black hide, dried crut splashed on his flanks, watching his eyes set wide apart, unblinking eyes under the widespread horns as smooth and solid as driftwood polished by the sand, the sharp tips uptilted so that to see them did something to your heart.

He looked forward all the year to that moment when the bull would come out into the square on that day when you watched his eyes while he made his choice of whom in the square he would attack in that sudden head-lowering, horn-reaching, quick cat-gallop that stopped your heart dead when it started. He had looked
forward to that moment all the year when he was a boy; but the feeling when the
Inglés
gave the order about the message was the same as when you woke to hear the reprieve of the rain falling on the slate roof, against the stone wall and into the puddles on the dirt street of the village.

He had always been very brave with the bull in those village
capeas,
as brave as any in the village or of the other near-by villages, and not for anything would he have missed it any year although he did not go to the
capeas
of other villages. He was able to wait still when the bull charged and only jumped aside at the last moment. He waved a sack under his muzzle to draw him off when the bull had some one down and many times he had held and pulled on the horns when the bull had some one on the ground and pulled sideways on the horn, had slapped and kicked him in the face until he left the man to charge some one else.

He had held the bull's tail to pull him away from a fallen man, bracing hard and pulling and twisting. Once he had pulled the tail around with one hand until he could reach a horn with the other and when the bull had lifted his head to charge him he had run backwards, circling with the bull, holding the tail in one hand and the horn in the other until the crowd had swarmed onto the bull with their knives and stabbed him. In the dust and the heat, the shouting, the bull and man and wine smell, he had been in the first of the crowd that threw themselves onto the bull and he knew the feeling when the bull rocked and bucked under him and he lay across the withers with one arm locked around the base of the horn and his hand holding the other horn tight, his fingers locked as his body tossed and wrenched and his left arm felt as though it would tear from the socket while he lay on the hot, dusty, bristly, tossing slope of muscle, the ear clenched tight in his teeth, and drove his knife again and again and again into the swelling, tossing bulge of the neck that was now spouting hot on his fist as he let his weight hang on the high slope of the withers and banged and banged into the neck.