For Whom The Bell Tolls

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."

"Que va, you will guard them. You've guarded them once already."

"Ingles," 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."

34

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. Andres, 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 Andres 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.

Andres 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 Ingles 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 Ingles 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.